Teens sue San Francisco after police crackdown at skateboarding event

Naomi Lopez was having dinner when she received a startling text from her 15-year-old daughter, Carmen: She was under arrest.

That didn’t make sense, Lopez recalled thinking. Carmen should have been just blocks away from their San Francisco home, where she had planned to watch skateboarders at a July event at Dolores Park.

“We thought it was a joke, and we’re like, ‘Ha-ha, very funny,’” Lopez told The Washington Post. “And then like a few minutes later, she’s like, ‘No, for real. I think they’re arresting me.’”

Lopez arrived to find a surreal scene, she said: San Francisco police officers surrounding dozens of teenagers who sat huddled outside on a chilly summer night. She was witnessing the aftermath of a heavily staffed police operation to shut down an unpermitted skateboarding event that authorities said sparked vandalism and violence, necessitating a mass arrest. But San Francisco now faces a class-action lawsuit from four of the teenagers, including Carmen, alleging that the roughly 80 juveniles corralled by police were wrongfully detained without being given a chance to disperse and held for hours without access to food, water or bathrooms, in violation of the police department’s own juvenile detention policies.

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“Police were supposedly responding to safety concerns about this skateboarding event,” said Rachel Lederman, an attorney for the teenagers and their families. “But in fact it was police that endangered children by surrounding them on the street and holding them in the cold and darkness.”

The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office told The Post that it would respond to the lawsuit in court once it was served. The San Francisco Police Department declined to comment.

In a July meeting of the Police Commission, Police Chief William Scott said the department had increased its response for the “Hill Bomb” event this year because there had been violence and property damage at previous editions. During the event this summer, police read a dispersal order 12 times, then declared a riot amid continued instances of violence and vandalism, before officers encircled a group of around 100 individuals and conducted a mass arrest, Scott said.

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San Francisco’s hilly streets have long harbored a thrill-seeking skateboarding culture. The “Hill Bomb” at Dolores Park — an unpermitted annual gathering during which young skateboarders hurtle down the steep streets flanking the park in the city’s Mission District — had drawn controversy in previous years for incidents of injuries, violence and vandalism, according to the police department. In 2020, a cyclist died after colliding with a skateboarder during the event.

On July 8, the date of the 2023 event, San Francisco police and transportation workers set up barricades blocking the steepest parts of the hill but permitted skateboarding to take place as a crowd of around 200 gathered in the afternoon, according to the lawsuit.

Police began making announcements for the crowd to disperse from the park at 7:15 p.m. after the crowd became violent, vandalized several light-rail vehicles, and threw fireworks and smoke bombs at officers, according to a news release. An hour later, officers followed a group of people seen removing barricades and vandalizing a light-rail vehicle and conducted a mass arrest, charging 32 adults and 81 juveniles with inciting a riot, conspiracy and remaining present at an unlawful assembly, according to the release.

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The lawsuit alleges that scores of juveniles who were unassociated with the event or attempting to leave, including Carmen, were corralled by police officers and wrongfully arrested in their sweep.

Carmen and another plaintiff who was 13 at the time went to the park to watch the skateboarding and left after hearing a dispersal order but were corralled by police officers on the streets surrounding Dolores Park when they tried to leave, according to the lawsuit. A 17-year-old plaintiff skateboarded at the event, left the park after hearing an order to disperse and was allegedly blocked on a nearby street by officers pointing weapons at him. Another 15-year-old plaintiff was riding a scooter to a friend’s house and passed a street near Dolores Park when police officers stopped her, directed her to turn around and led her back toward the park, where she became trapped between police lines, the lawsuit states.

Lopez, Carmen’s mother, arrived at the block where the group was corralled soon after and was told she could not pick up her daughter, she said. Most of the children were dressed lightly for the sunny daytime event and now looked cold and uncomfortable, she said. Records show the temperature was in the high 50s that night.

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“They were sitting there, like, freezing and shivering,” Lopez said. “They were looking all in disbelief.”

Officers detained the group, which mostly contained minors aged 13 to 17, for over three hours on the street and did not provide shelter, blankets or jackets, according to the lawsuit. Members of the group were allegedly handcuffed with zip ties and not permitted to go to the bathroom.

Around 11 p.m., police transferred the arrestees who were over 18 to a county jail and bussed the minors in groups to a nearby police station, where they were fingerprinted, cited and eventually released, according to the lawsuit. Carmen was released to her family around 1 a.m., but some of the teens remained on the street until around 2 a.m., and the last minor was released from the police station at 4:15 a.m., the lawsuit states.

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All charges against the corralled individuals were later dropped, Mission Local reported in August.

During the crackdown, officers violated their department’s own policies for juvenile detention, which require police to provide children with access to toilets, water and snacks, and to immediately notify parents and public defenders upon arresting juveniles, according to the lawsuit. Some minors’ parents were never notified about their arrests, the lawsuit added. Police also violated the department’s crowd-control policies by corralling individuals who were streets away from Dolores Park, where the dispersal order was issued, the lawsuit alleged.

“It’s kind of unprecedented,” said Lederman, the attorney. “I haven’t heard of a situation like this before where so many children were arrested.”

Lopez said that the family is still processing the experience and that Carmen’s trust in her city’s police officers was shaken. Lopez, who lives near Dolores Park, said she wished the city had administered the event itself to run it safely instead of assigning a heavy-handed police response.

“It’s painful,” she said. “I love San Francisco, and there’s no place I would rather be, but I want San Francisco to be a functional city, and I want it to serve its community, including the youth.”

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