GOODER AND HARDER, SAN FRAN: Teens sue San Francisco after mass arrests at skateboarding 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.
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.
“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.
San Francisco in 2023: where massive shoplifting, open-air drug use and defecation in the streets goes unabated, but skateboarders get arrested. If Mike Judge had written such scenes into Idiocracy, his producers would have told him to dial it back a notch or ten, or risk total unbelievability.
Of course, California’s governments did try to warn skateboarders in 2020 that, as Sheldon Cooper would say, they were having fun wrong: