The Dolores Park hill bomb has occurred every summer for the past decade, and last year ended in the largest mass arrest of teenagers that Police Chief Bill Scott said was the largest during his tenure. All parties promised to do better in planning for this year’s version, and both city officials and skaters said they would be interested in a safer, sanctioned hill bomb.
Nevertheless, with the event in two weeks’ time, San Francisco officials have declined to take a different approach. Instead, their message to would-be skaters is simple: Stay away, or you will be arrested again.
“If anyone chooses to break the law, the SFPD will not hesitate to make arrests,” said Evan Sernoffsky, the department’s top spokesperson, in a statement responding to questions about this year’s event.
The event this year has been advertised for July 6, and hundreds of young skaters will likely descend on Dolores Park that day to careen down the blocks around the park as spectators cheer them on, holding beers and smoking blunts in an informal outdoor party.
“At this late in the game, there is very little that could be done to make it safer,” said Aaron Breetwor, a skateboard advocate and teacher who has, in more than a dozen meetings this past year, repeatedly urged officials to come up with a sanctioned event.
Neither Breetwor nor other skating advocates have applied for a permit to host the hill bomb — a potentially costly ordeal that would involve paying for insurance, medics, and police overtime — but said the city should have done more to find a partner who could.
“It basically seems like a trap,” he said. “If they know well enough that the event is going to happen, they should know well enough to conduct outreach.”
The police department appears unmoved, however. Sernoffsky pointed to last year’s vandalism and “assaulted officers” — Muni vehicles and buildings were tagged, one officer was cut on the forehead, and the crowd threw several bottles and cans at the police — and said the department “ultimately arrested numerous people who chose to continue to commit violence and property destruction.”
“We will do the same this year if necessary,” he continued. That approach ended poorly then, and the city is involved in an ongoing civil rights lawsuit stemming from the 2023 arrests.
Supervisor 8 Rafael Mandelman, who represents the area, was similarly candid: “They shouldn’t come. Not this year. Not to this event.”
“If you participate,” he continued, “you do so at the risk that the police are going to try to stop you.”
The San Francisco Police Department said it would hold a press conference soon and a meeting with neighbors next week, at a date to be determined, to “assure them that the SFPD will enforce the law and protect public safety.”
Too little, too late, say veteran skaters
Last July, as hundreds of skaters and spectators arrived at Dolores, the San Francisco Police Department moved swiftly to quash the event. It put up barricades before skaters arrived at the park, and eventually arrested 113 young people — 81 of them minors — in one of the largest mass detentions in recent city history.
The operation was a fiasco, involving dozens of armor-clad officers holding the teenagers late into the night without food, water, or access to restrooms. Several said they urinated on themselves or relieved themselves with a bucket thrown down by a neighbor; others alleged they had been arrested while simply passing through the area.
The department is currently being sued in a federal class action lawsuit for alleged mistreatment and civil-rights violations, with a potential multi-million dollar payout to the arrested youth.
All of that, veteran skaters say, should have prompted the city to reconsider its approach. Instead, they say, officials have done little to prepare for what is a predictable occurrence and, in so doing, missed out on an opportunity to create a safe event.
Joe Sciarillo, a decades-long skater who has participated in several hill bombs, said the threats of arrest make it more likely skaters will come out. He said skaters were likely to return no matter what, but the police treatment of an inherently rebellious culture likely only cements their desires.
“For a lot of youth, and even for some adults, it’s going to have a backfire effect,” he said. “It’s not just about the adrenaline rush — it’s about reclaiming the space.”
Indeed, in dozens of comments on the Instagram post advertising the hill bomb, the tone was defiant or laughed off the likely police response. “fuck it not catching us doe SFPD,” read one comment. “WE GOIN TO JAIL,” read another.
The most liked comment? “The cops are fina whoop yall like Rodney king.”
City has made few preparations
For years, the city has looked at the hill bomb with prejudice — and for good reason. In 2017, a police sergeant knocked a skater off his board, breaking his ankle and costing the city $275,000 in a settlement; the same year, a skateboarding icon landed in the hospital with a serious head injury; in 2019, another longtime skateboard was put in a two-week coma; in 2020, a 23-year-old cyclist was killed after a collision; and in 2022, a man was stabbed during a fight.
Many of the park’s neighbors have long complained about the hill bomb, including this week, when several emailed Mayor London Breed, Mandelman, Scott, and other city officials pleading with them to stop the event. One wrote it should be shut down “by any means necessary.”
Still, there was indication that 2023 was a turning point. Ryen Motzek, a lifelong skater and president of the Mission Merchants Association, said he heard from several city officials immediately after the mass arrests last year, when there seemed to be unanimity that the city needed to find a different path forward.
But the communication petered out, Motzek said. “There was a lot of panic after the event, and it just kind of fizzled.”
With just weeks left, Motzek said the plans put forward now feel like a “scramble.”
Mandelman, for his part, said two weeks is sufficient time to communicate the shutdown. And, he added, he is ready and willing to work with “people who are interested in actually putting together an event” for next year, but is awaiting a leader from the skateboarding community to step forward.
“No promoter has come forward to try to do a hill bomb in a way that is safe,” he said. “So we’re sort of where we have been at this point every year for a bunch of years.”
For skaters, that explanation was insufficient.
“Sorry, sometimes you gotta be proactive,” said Motzek. Without city leaders taking the reins, he said the chaos would only continue year after year. “Here we are again, just hoping for the best.”
Breetwor, the skating advocate, said the city could still act to make the event safer: Medics lining the course, plastic barriers to control crowds, free helmets at the top of the hill and, most important, removing the raised pavement dots at the bottom of the hill that the Municipal Transportation Authority installed years ago.
Breetwor and other skaters have called those dots a death trap, just as likely to cause a fatality on their own as they are to deter skating.
“As long as those are in the ground, somebody is going to die,” he said. “And it won’t be because the event is dangerous. It’s because the city made the street more dangerous.”
Giselle, a 17-year-old who was arrested during last year’s police operation, sighed when she heard of the police response. She is still “angry” at the treatment she faced last year, which she called “very illegal,” and said the city was being shortsighted. “It seems like it’ll happen anyways, so they should take a different approach.”
Still, she said, she was likely to stay away herself.
“I’m definitely not planning on going,” she said.
London Breed is just so spectacularly bad at mayor-ing. (And no, I’m not a supporter of any of the others.) This is precisely the kind of thing where leadership is supposed to kick in. You bring the parties together, find the roadblocks, and find solutions. Easy? No. Do-able? Yes. We put a ski jump on a public street; we should be able to manage some kids skating down a hill.
Certainly. Some years back, snow was trucked in to turn steep Taylor Street on Russian Hill into a ski run.
Hopefully these kids will choose to engage in a more productive and less dangerous form of anti-social behavior, like sideshows.
Less dangerous? You’re joking right? Seriously you are being sarcastic?
Police are going to bring officers in on overtime pay and pulling patrolling officers reducing its already poor coverage from different sectors of the city to arrest juveniles and broke skateboarders, because they are easy targets. The hillbomb crowds won’t have the finances or property of value that could be used to reduce the burden on taxpayers. Sideshows go unchallenged month after month year after year, because the police are afraid of the likely hood of violent resistance in the forms of mob mentality, gun violence, use of vehicles as weapons, etc… yet arrests could reduce the numbers of illegal weapons off our streets, recover stolen vehicles & other properties, arrests of people with outstanding warrants, drugs, vehicles could be auctioned off, people would have finances to pay fines/bail bonds/restitution etc….
But people won’t bother to put pressure on the mayor or sfpd because it’s not happening on their front lawn….
Nice analysis Peter Tousignant,
Maybe make the Event a Moveable Feast like that end of month bike thing.
Do Multiple Runs Simultaneously all with a live feed I can sit on my duff and watch ?
Like going from one New Year’s Eve celebration to another on your computer.
Dolores Park has seen it all from Slavery and Murder to Community and Bravo.
h.
Many of the neighbors watch this every year, as one of them I can say the entire neighborhood is not against this, but would prefer it to be more organized and safer.
The city has done something – it has reiterated its position that the event is dangerous, illegal, and (last year) resulted in looting and arrests. It cannot sanction this event, because doing so would leave it (and taxpayers) open to huge liability when someone gets killed or paralyzed.
So the skaters know what they face going in. If they decide to break the laws that everyone (not just they) are bound to follow in any social order, they will face the consequences.
Barbara,
What do you think of the Bull Run Hemingway wrote about ?
It’s hormones.
Peacocks spread their tails.
Hmmm, I better stop there.
lol
h.
The Bull Run? That’s in Spain, not in the litigation happy USofA.
Also, to add to the list of misdeeds, let’s also remember the J train that ended up covered in tags. You and I and everybody else here got to pick up that tab.
mandelman is worthless at his job. he’s been the supervisor of this district for many years now and *he* hasn’t taken the initiative to reach out to the CHILDREN involved in this event. sfpd is going to be fined for last year’s arrests and taxpayers will foot the bill. meanwhile, sfpd wants to buy robot dogs and machine guns.
So wait a minute, all I have to do is to get a skateboard, go down the hill at Dolores st. on a skateboard that day, get promptly arrested, PEE MY PANTS for good measure, and cry and CALL MY MOMMY and I can get a million dollar payday as a victim? I WILL WEAR A BABY BIB AND A BONNET . I’ll see you there!
The reason this became an issue was because during the mass arrest, children were detained to at least 8 hours straight. The urination was due to SFPD forces detaining those kids for what was basically half of a day.
So yes, all you have to do to get a payout is get arrested with excessive force. Go ahead and try it!
Maybe the cops could go “not hesitate to arrest” people in soma and tenderloin for pooping in the streets, leaving garbage everywhere and SMASHING CAR WINDOWS. Oh wait…those people don’t have any money to pay tickets. Right.
I live near where this mayhem happens, and as far as I have seen, the main points of it seem to be to risk injury – and possibly death – while giving a big middle finger to the people who live in the neighborhood and to the City at large. It’s not something that can be made “safe”, because the participants don’t want it to be safe. As for “outreach”, did any of the skateboarders ever ask the neighbors how they feel about being “blessed” by being blocked in by an annual festival featuring massive crowds, injuries, fights, and graffiti? I’ll take my answer off the air…
SFPD: “If anyone chooses to break the law, the SFPD will not hesitate to make arrests.”
Sideshow participants: LOL
In any event, It’s wild to me that we’re talking about “preparations” and “outreach.” You don’t get to do whatever you want to, just because you want to. “But we think it’s cool” is not an argument.
Bottom Line: you can take the horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.
Both sides take heed: actions (or lack thereof) have consequences.
Most people quietly support the police, because the skaters come across as arrogant, spoiled, and selfish. For example, here’s some world-class entitlement:
“Neither Breetwor nor other skating advocates have applied for a permit to host the hill bomb — a potentially costly ordeal that would involve paying for insurance, medics, and police overtime — but said the city should have done more to find a partner who could.
‘It basically seems like a trap,’ he said. ‘If they know well enough that the event is going to happen, they should know well enough to conduct outreach.'”
Poop on the sidewalk, ok.
Walk around naked in front of children, ok.
But, don’t you DARE ride a skateboard down a hill! That’s where we draw the line!
Vito and all,
The Cops should break out their own Boards and race the ‘kids’.
Face it, this is a serious Sport and most of the Boarders are Serious Athletes.
Cops have lots and lots of serious athletes too.
I know, cause 30 years ago I climbed serious hills behind them and surrounded by delinquent kids.
Leave the armor behind and dress more for hockey.
h.
Serious sport with serious athletes? Please, more like pretend sport with pretend athletes.
Skateboarding is not a crime ACAB
Campers,
The ‘Course’ is on my daily walk and SFMTA was out last month moving the dots (further uphill) to make them more dangerous.
And, laughing about it.
I heard a delivery guy on a scooter lost his life to the cops dots a few months back.
The dots belong around West Portal Station streets not on Dolores.
Sister Vish Knew says to get a corporate sponsor.
They’d want more and taller dots and naked skaters.
Let’s elect our Police Chief so we know who to blame.
And, by the way, this was set to come up at the Police Commission at request of Jesus Yanez and Max Carter-Oberstone.
But, they pretty much quit meeting.
Go 9’ers (that’s Roberto Hernandez touch there, cutting out the ‘4’ on Niners)
h.
More speed bumps
Hey guy,
Good to see your moniker.
I think that instead of putting flowers where someone got killed on our streets that DPW should install big round speed dots like they have on Dolores Street now.
When you run over a set it will remind you that someone got killed there and you should slow down out of respect.
h.
This seems like an event The Gap should sponsor especially given the context of their commercial about street skating.
They also did a collab with Palace skateboards.
Mike,
That’s what Sister Vish Knew said about Gap Sponsorship.
h.
This is the same city that did not prosecute the woman who mowed down an entire family racing her SUV on the sidewalk just recently? But we’re gonna get those darned skateboarders riding a hill that was meant to be rode?
‘Nuff said…
You mean the crash at West Portal? Case still open and under investigation.
As usual, ML sides with radicals and anarchists. 🙄
ML continues to be a one-note yawn.
Brian,
Try SFist for a better fit.
h.
Can we stand outside and prevent the police from herding and arresting people? Or take it out of their huge budget directly and fiscally . I’m ok with taking it out of Mayor Breed’s salary.
No problem stealing property or assaulting someone, but don’t go downhill on a piece of wood with 4 wheels!
What a clownshow.
Remember when one of those people going downhill on a piece of wood killed someone? I’m more than 4 years old, so I remember.