Three years after San Francisco police arrested 117 people — mostly children and teenagers — at the annual Dolores Hill Bomb skateboarding event, a federal civil rights lawsuit has reached a pivotal crossroads: will a judge end it, or will a jury hear the whole ugly night?

The city wants Federal Judge Lisa Cisneros to issue a summary judgment that would spare San Francisco a costly trial. But the attorneys representing those arrested say every material fact is disputed — from whether police had probable cause to detain each individual, to whether the conditions of their detention violated state law. Until that threshold question is resolved, 117 people who say they were swept up in a mass arrest without justification remain in legal limbo.

A June 16 hearing before Judge Cisneros laid bare the opposing theories of that July 8, 2023 night in the Mission.

Around 7:15 p.m., police issued orders to disperse a crowd of roughly 200 people who had gathered at Dolores Park for the hill bomb — an unofficial annual event in which skateboarders race down the park's steep slope onto Church Street, drawing large and rowdy crowds. Violence had broken out, city attorney Reilly Stoler told the court: glass bottles and fireworks were thrown at officers, and a sergeant was injured after a 15-year-old girl cut his forehead during an arrest.

The group moved. Officers tracked them to the intersection of Church and 18th Streets, where two Muni trains were vandalized. A second dispersal order was issued. Then, around 8:15 p.m., officers formed a line and swept south down Dolores Street.

By 8:35 p.m., according to the lawsuit, that moving police line had effectively boxed in bystanders on 17th Street between Dolores and Guerrero. They were told to get on the ground. By 8:41 p.m., 117 people were encircled. They would not be read their Miranda rights for another 37 minutes.

"Guilt by association"

The central legal fight is whether police needed to assess each person individually before making an arrest — or whether the group's collective behavior was enough.

Plaintiffs' attorney Rachel Lederman told the court that officers made no such individual assessments. Kids started running, she said, because police pointed batons and less-lethal weapons at them — and in fleeing, they were herded into the trap. Testimony from at least two teenage girls, she said, showed they had followed officers' directions to go north, only to be encircled by the line coming south.

"All the facts are contested," Lederman said.

Stoler pushed back. "It wasn't hard to tell who was involved," he argued, contending that officers were entitled to treat the crowd as a single unlawfully assembled group rather than 117 separate probable-cause determinations.

Emilly Zhu, a legal fellow at the ACLU of Northern California, framed the stakes plainly in a press statement: probable cause must be determined "kid by kid" — otherwise the arrests amount to "guilt by association."

That question carries significant weight beyond this case. Police officers nationwide enjoy "qualified immunity," which shields them from civil liability even for mistaken judgment calls, as long as those calls were "reasonable." Whether rounding up more than a hundred people at a chaotic event — without individually assessing each — passes that bar is exactly the kind of question courts have divided over.

The conditions of detention

Beyond probable cause, plaintiffs alleged that the conditions of detention were "abusive." Some teenagers said they were held in the cold for hours and forced to urinate on the street because they had no access to a bathroom.

Stoler argued that state regulations governing detention conditions apply to formal detention facilities — not to a street hold. Lederman countered that officers deliberately "evaded" those regulations by keeping youth outside and on buses rather than walking them the single block to Mission Police Station.

The judge, Cisneros noted, raised her own question: how would bystanders caught in the moving police line have known where to go? They should have stopped running and left the area, Stoler responded.

City attorney spokesperson Jen Kwart defended the operation in a statement: "a stubborn faction of the crowd refused to leave, caused mayhem, and were lawfully arrested. The Police Department must have the ability to control a violent crowd in order to maintain public safety."

During the time between the encirclement and Miranda warnings, at least 17 children and parents told officers they were bystanders with no idea why they were being held. Lederman argued that while officers don't have to take someone's word for their innocence, 17 such claims should have raised alarms about whether probable cause existed at all.

Judge Cisneros did not rule from the bench. Her decision on whether to issue a summary judgment — or send the case to a jury — could come at any point in the months ahead.

The class action lawsuit was filed against the City of San Francisco, the San Francisco Police Department, and several individual officers. The ACLU of Northern California is among the organizations supporting the plaintiffs.