Rachel Lederman

At about 8:40 on the evening of July 8, 2023, San Francisco police officers who had closed both ends of the 3500 block of Seventeenth Street, between Dolores and Guerrero, announced by megaphone to the people inside that they were all under arrest and should sit down. The department’s incident report lists 113 arrestees. About 81 were children between twelve and seventeen, roughly half of them under sixteen; the 32 adults were mostly eighteen and nineteen. They had been part of, or near, or walking past the Dolores Hill Bomb, the informal downhill skateboarding gathering that young people organize each July on Dolores Street, and they included teenagers, young adults, passersby, and people who said they had followed earlier dispersal instructions or had arrived after those instructions were given. No petition or charge was ever filed against any of them.

Rachel Lederman is lead counsel for the class they now form. She filed the federal action, J.T. v. City and County of San Francisco, on December 19, 2023, with the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, where she is Senior Counsel, the Community Law Office and Bobbie Stein, for three girls aged thirteen to fifteen suing through their guardians, and the complaint sought damages and forward-looking relief under federal and California law. Whatever police may do about violence or an unlawful assembly elsewhere in a crowd, the question the case puts to the court is whether an officer may arrest every person caught between two police lines without an individualized basis for believing that person committed an offense.

She has been putting that question to West Coast police departments since 1987, across nearly four decades of defending hundreds of demonstrators in court and of winning the impact cases that changed how those departments confront a crowd. Her cases have produced compensation, class relief, crowd-control standards, release procedures, and injunctions that govern later police and university conduct, and they are built the same way each time: she reconstructs the weapon, the range, the target, the order, the warning, the route of exit, the custody time, the medical injury and the command responsibility, so that what police did to each person can be judged against written constitutional standards rather than against generalized claims about disorder. Several of those standards she helped write herself, in an Oakland crowd-control policy that a federal court approved in 2004, and the Seventeenth Street case turns on the rule that policy states in one sentence: there must be probable cause for each individual arrest.

Seventeenth Street, Dolores to Guerrero

The Hill Bomb runs down Dolores Street between Twenty-First and Eighteenth. The plaintiffs alleged that the San Francisco Police Department knew of the 2023 event at least three weeks ahead, never contacted the skateboarding community, and put up barricades at Dolores and Twentieth and at Cumberland with “no signs, announcements, or other indication that skateboarding or the Hill Bomb event were prohibited.” Skating went on from about four to six in the afternoon as the crowd grew to about 200, most of them children and youth. Between about 7:15 and 7:30 police told people to leave Dolores Street, and later that Dolores Park was closed, without saying which way to go; around 8:15 to 8:30 a line of officers moved people from Seventeenth and Dolores toward Seventeenth and Guerrero, where a second line blocked the way. J.T., who was thirteen, had heard an announcement she could not fully make out and was walking toward Seventeenth to meet a friend’s father, who was waiting one block away, when she met officers in helmets with shields and was surrounded; one of them told her, “just listen to what we’re going to say; we don’t want to hurt you.” L.R., fifteen, was riding in the bike lane on Seventeenth with friends on electric scooters, did not know there was a Hill Bomb, and found the exits blocked. C.L., fifteen, heard the dispersal announcement and obeyed it, and was corralled on Seventeenth anyway while her family was refused permission to take her home.

The arrests came at sunset. The children sat on the pavement for at least two hours as the night turned cold and windy, without shelter, coats or blankets; some had their hats taken. After at least two hours officers searched them, seized phones, jewelry and belts, and put zip ties on their wrists that left marks and were not loosened until processing was nearly finished. Requests for a bathroom were refused; youths used a bucket a neighbor lowered to the street or urinated in their pants, and a boy who vomited was left to be cared for by the other children. Parents who arrived were turned away and sent to Ingleside Station and then to Mission Station; some waited from nine in the evening until three or four in the morning, and L.R.’s parents were never notified. About eleven the adults went to county jail until the morning of July 9; Jack Brundage, nineteen, had been told to walk west, then blocked and told to sit, and spent an hour and a half to two hours in a hot, crowded police wagon without water, air or a bathroom, then hours more in the wagon at the jail, before his release at about eleven the next morning. About twenty-two girls were put on a Muni bus, driven one block to Mission Station, and held on it about forty-five minutes with the windows and doors closed before being taken in small groups to a bathroom under watch, thumbprinted and cited. The boys stayed on the street in zip ties, some against a wall, until a second bus about 2:30, and about fifty-nine of them were then held in an open-air concrete garage area where a sprinkler went off; their first bathroom came between three and 3:30 in the morning, about seven hours in. L.R. was released around midnight, J.T. about 1 a.m., C.L. at 1:15, and the last child at 4:15 a.m. Some children got their first water as they left. At least one child walked home alone. The citations named Penal Code sections 404.6(a), 182(a)(1) and 409, some marked “F”; the district attorney filed nothing, and on August 11, 2023 Lederman’s organization and community groups wrote District Attorney Brooke Jenkins demanding that every case be dropped.

Of the arrestees, 57 were Latinx and 20 Black, in a city that is 15.9 percent Latinx and 5.7 percent Black. Police Chief William Scott told the police commission on July 19 that officers had faced “an extremely chaotic situation over a large area,” cited fireworks, fires, vandalism and an assault on a sergeant by two teenagers, said the department’s juvenile policies had been followed, and described a know-your-rights card handed to each minor; the department later put its overtime for the night at about $143,000. Lederman spoke for her clients when the suit was filed: “Almost all the arrestees are teenagers, so they are very concerned about how this arrest may impact their futures,” and the complaint asked the federal court to clear their records and enter an order of exoneration.

Acting as a Unit

The city moved to dismiss, and its argument was the one every mass-arrest defendant makes: the crowd could be arrested as a unit. The Ninth Circuit allows that under Lyall v. City of Los Angeles when “a group or crowd of people is behaving as a unit,” and the D.C. Circuit in Carr v. District of Columbia requires only that police reasonably believe the entire crowd is acting together. On June 13, 2024 Magistrate Judge Lisa J. Cisneros of the Northern District of California held that the complaint showed no such basis: the plaintiffs alleged no connection between the people arrested on Seventeenth Street and property damage elsewhere, only C.L. was alleged to have heard the dispersal orders, and she had obeyed them. “There is no allegation that any other member of the group had disobeyed orders to disperse,” the court wrote. It declined to treat the department’s public account of the night as true at the pleading stage and rejected the city’s comparison of the gathering to an automotive sideshow. On qualified immunity the defendants relied on Haber v. City of Portland, a summary-judgment decision; the court answered that this case was before it on a motion to dismiss and that, under Ybarra v. Illinois and Lyall, the law was clearly established that merely being present at the scene of suspected illegal activity does not supply probable cause. “Defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity at this stage of the case.”

The Fourth Amendment claims survived against Captain Thomas Harvey, the event commander, Lieutenant Matt Sullivan, who commanded the tactical unit, and Chief Scott, including the claims about the conditions of confinement, together with a claim against the city under Monell for Scott’s involvement and ratification, the Bane Act claim, false arrest and imprisonment, negligence, and the requests for declaratory and injunctive relief; the court followed Reese and Cornell over Shoyoye on the Bane Act and held that Penal Code section 847(b) and Government Code section 820.8 do not protect an arrest made without probable cause. It dismissed the First Amendment, equal protection, Ralph Act and policy-based Monell theories with leave to amend by July 5, 2024. “All our main claims survived,” Lederman said that week. Discovery followed under a protective order: police video, policies and communications, the arrest and detention of minors, a dispute over subpoenas to the children’s schools that the court froze in July 2024, and a juvenile-records stipulation ordered in August. The court related R.P. v. City and County of San Francisco, a separate suit by a fifteen-year-old bystander arrested on the same block, and in September 2025 gave leave to add two named plaintiffs; the corrected second amended class complaint was filed October 2, 2025.

Five Representatives, Three Subclasses

By the time Lederman moved for class certification the city had conceded the shape of the case. Its lawyers did not oppose certifying liability for false arrest and agreed that those claims rise or fall on whether there was probable cause for the group arrest; they asked for subclasses on the conditions claims, which the plaintiffs accepted, and at the hearing appeared to drop their objection on damages. In its incident report the department described defiance of orders, reckless skating, fireworks, barricades pulled down, objects thrown and Muni vehicles vandalized despite multiple dispersal orders, an officer stabbed with an unknown object and treated for a head injury, a plan by Harvey and Sullivan to arrest roughly 200 to 250 people at Eighteenth and Dolores, the encirclement on Seventeenth, detainees made to sit because of the fireworks, the unsearched crowd and the earlier violence, and a loaded handgun found afterward in a bag on the street. On October 30, 2025 Judge Cisneros certified a class of all persons arrested in the 3500 block of Seventeenth Street on July 8, 2023, in the mass arrest at approximately 8:40 p.m., under Rule 23(b)(2) and (b)(3), with subclasses, in the city’s own categories, for girls under eighteen, boys under eighteen and adults, represented by J.T., C.L. and L.R., by S.H., a fifteen-year-old boy held in the garage area until about 2 a.m., and by Jack Brundage. “Whether Defendants had sufficient cause to conduct the mass arrest will be addressed for the class as a whole,” the court wrote, and “Rule 23 grants courts no license to engage in free-ranging merits inquiries at the certification stage.” It certified false-arrest liability, the conditions claims by subclass, general damages by length of detention and subclass, and declaratory and injunctive relief including expungement, holding that “the need for individualized findings as to the amount of damages does not defeat class certification.” Lederman’s team, the Community Law Office and Bobbie Stein became class counsel, and the city was ordered to produce the unredacted incident report with every class member’s name within a week.

“SFPD engaged in an outrageous round-up and mass arrest of children and youth,” Lederman said when the order came down. “SFPD did not provide them access to a bathroom for up to seven hours,” and “Parents were not notified until after midnight, if at all.” Gabriela Lopez of the Community Law Office said the class now let everyone arrested on the block be represented, be compensated, have their records cleared and obtain reforms. Any judgment or settlement will come out of the city’s general fund. The class notice went out with an opt-out deadline of April 20, 2026. The city has since kept the Hill Bomb off Dolores Street: on July 6, 2024, after Lederman’s organization wrote the department on June 27 urging it to protect the young people at the event rather than target them, and after she said publicly that “That will not happen through increasingly aggressive and militarized policing,” scores of barricades and dozens of officers lined Dolores and the skaters rode Church Street instead, and there was no Hill Bomb in 2025.

Kid by Kid

The parties filed competing summary-judgment and expert motions in the spring of 2026, and on June 16, 2026 the city asked Judge Cisneros to decide the case without a jury. Deputy City Attorney Reilly Stoler walked the court through street maps and body-camera footage: the people on Seventeenth were an unlawfully assembled crowd, bottles and fireworks had been thrown, an officer had been “stabbed in the head,” and “It wasn’t hard to tell who was involved.” Detention regulations, he argued, apply only to facilities; moving 117 people was a “huge logistical process”; and any passerby should have stopped running and left. Lederman answered that “pretty much every single one of the facts that counsel reported are disputed.” She put in declarations from minors who had gone near the park for ice cream or to visit it and had begun moving where police told them; teenage girls who testified that they followed orders to go north and were caught by the southbound line; at least seventeen children and parents who told officers that night that they were bystanders; and the fact that Mission Station, with its bathrooms, stood about a block away while the department, she argued, deliberately kept the teenagers outside and on buses to evade the regulations that govern juvenile detention. The judge asked the city, “What made them believe that those people on that block were involved?” and “Was there something specific to how they were conducting themselves?”, asked how a passerby would have known where to go, asked why an officer’s early estimate of about fifty people had ended in an arrest of more than twice that number, and asked whether any reason to hold people remained at 9:18 p.m., when their rights were read. Stoler said yes; Lederman disagreed. The court took the motions under submission.

Nine youth-justice organizations, among them the Juvenile Law Center and the Youth Law Center, filed a joint amicus brief on the harm arrest does to young people, and the ACLU of Northern California filed its own on probable cause; its lawyer Emily Zhu told the court that probable cause must be determined “kid by kid.” The plaintiffs’ brief put it this way: “On July 8, 2023, Defendants effectively criminalized being a youth in the Mission Dolores neighborhood.” Lopez said, “This is the only mass arrest of children in San Francisco history.” On October 1, 2026 the court ruled in the related R.P. case, on the same arrest, that “Officers cannot establish probable cause based on a suspect’s mere proximity to a lawbreaker,” that a mass arrest requires “a reasonable belief that the entire crowd is acting as a unit and therefore all members of the crowd violated the law,” and that a jury must decide the claims against Harvey, who ordered the arrests, and Sullivan, who helped coordinate the encirclement.

In an order of January 30, 2026 the court had set a final pretrial conference for October 9, 2026, jury selection for October 16 and a twelve-day jury trial beginning October 19, and, because many class members now live or attend school outside the Bay Area, had arranged for them to testify by videoconference and possibly to watch the trial remotely. The class notice posted in September 2026 sets trial for June 14 through July 1, 2027, at 450 Golden Gate Avenue, and tells class members that the court has not yet decided whether the defendants did anything wrong and that the two sides have not settled. The individual witness stays at the center of the case after it became a class action. Whether a thirteen-year-old was walking to meet a friend’s father, whether a fifteen-year-old in a bike lane knew there was a Hill Bomb at all, what the officer with the megaphone said and when, which way the lines moved and what routes they left open will be answered person by person, from video, dispersal announcements, officer locations, timing, parent communications and the routes available from Seventeenth Street.

A Policy Written at the Port

The rule that each arrest needs its own probable cause entered Oakland’s police policy through a case Lederman helped bring twenty years before the Hill Bomb. On the morning of April 7, 2003, about 500 people protesting the Iraq war picketed the gates of American President Lines and Stevedoring Services of America at the Port of Oakland, companies said to be shipping war materiel, while members of ILWU Local 10, who had met that morning to decide whether to work, waited outside the gates apart from the demonstrators. At about 7:15 a dispersal order went out that most of the people there could not hear or understand; the gates were cleared, the routes to BART and the parking lots were blocked, and at about 7:30 officers opened fire without further warning: sting-ball grenades of rubber pellets, tear gas, wooden dowels, lead-shot-filled beanbags fired from shotguns, batons, and motorcycles driven at the crowd, with officers pursuing people who were retreating and singling out legal observers, journalists, videographers and people holding bullhorns. Willow Rosenthal, heading from the SSA picket toward BART, was shot from about thirty feet: “I was hit on the back of the right calf as I attempted to run away from the police fire.” Nine Local 10 members standing by were hit; at least thirty-one people were arrested, some forty injured, and forty-six people filed suits or claims.

Local 10 and nine of its members, and in the companion case Coles v. City of Oakland six demonstrators, sued on June 26, 2003 before Judge Thelton E. Henderson; Lederman filed the Local 10 pleadings alongside John Burris, James B. Chanin, Michael Haddad, Julia Sherwin and the ACLU of Northern California, and National Lawyers Guild legal observers who had been at the port that morning were among the people officers had targeted. Chief Richard Word told the Citizens’ Police Review Board that the dowels were gone, that beanbags would be used only to prevent imminent injury, that motorcycle “bumping” would stop and that helmets would be numbered, and said, “My goal is to see that something like April 7 never happens again in Oakland.” Chanin called that “a good start” that “needs to be followed up by a written policy, by new training and by accountability if any officers violate the policy.” The written policy came through the litigation: on December 24, 2004 Judge Henderson approved the settlement that adopted Oakland’s Crowd Management and Crowd Control Policy, the city denying wrongdoing, and retained jurisdiction to enforce it with no termination date. Oakland paid the Coles plaintiffs $210,000, $48,000, $31,250, $30,000, $10,000 and $8,000, and on January 4, 2007 was ordered to pay $621,512.12 in fees and costs that included the work on the injunctive settlement.

The policy limited declarations of unlawful assembly to illegal conduct or a clear and present danger of imminent violence and forbade dispersing an assembly that had not been declared unlawful or that merely lacked a permit. It required repeated, amplified, audible announcements naming at least two routes out, in English and other languages as needed, and a safe opportunity to disperse before any arrest; barred indiscriminate less-lethal munitions against a crowd even if some individuals in it were violent; restricted beanbags to a specific, identified person posing an immediate threat; prohibited intentional motorcycle strikes, wooden dowels, stinger grenades, Tasers, canines, fire hoses and handheld chemical agents for crowd control; made the incident commander answerable for every dispersal, mass arrest and planned use of force; and required citation and release for minor offenses, with booking only on a documented exception. Two sentences govern mass arrests: “There must be probable cause for each individual arrest,” and “Association with a crowd is not enough.” Lederman helped turn constitutional principles into instructions officers could follow and courts could enforce, and from then on a police operation in Oakland could be measured against written commands developed through litigation rather than against an unwritten assertion of necessity. When Chief Howard Jordan announced on April 23, 2012 that the department would rewrite the policy to match the state’s POST guidelines, she, as counsel on the prior and current suits against the department, and the ACLU of Northern California wrote the next day to remind the city that the policy was a federal court order the department had repeatedly acknowledged it was bound by, and that the POST guidelines did not clearly prohibit the tactics the department had used the previous fall.

Twenty-Four Hours on Sixth Avenue

On November 5, 2010, the day Judge Robert Perry sentenced former BART officer Johannes Mehserle to two years for killing Oscar Grant, people rallied in downtown Oakland against the sentence and at about six in the evening marched from Fourteenth Street toward the Fruitvale BART station. Police lines pushed the march into a park, onto International Boulevard and into the residential streets of the East Lake neighborhood, and herded about 150 people into the 1700 block of Sixth Avenue, where officers in riot gear with guns and batons closed around them. Nobody gave a dispersal order; people who asked to leave or to speak with a commander were ignored; and at about 7:40, after roughly an hour and a half, an officer announced, “You’re all under arrest.” Only news media were let out. Dan Spalding, a National Lawyers Guild legal observer, was there: “I tried to tell the officers that I was a legal observer, but they handcuffed me and put me on a sheriff’s bus,” and “People urinated in their pants as we sat in the hot crowded bus.” The arrestees sat in plastic cuffs on the street and in buses and vans for about eight hours without a toilet, then went mostly to the North County Jail, a few to Santa Rita, into crowded cells without cots, adequate food, water, medication or care; women were ordered to take pregnancy tests under threat of transfer to Santa Rita, and some people were made to give DNA swabs under threat of longer detention. Katie Loncke: “No food was provided for more than twelve hours after our initial detention,” and “There was no room to lie down. I sat up against a wall for the entire night.” They were held fourteen to twenty-four hours, some longer, and released with a citation for a single violation of Penal Code section 408. None was ever charged.

Lederman filed the class action on June 13, 2011, signing first among counsel with Carol Sobel, Bobbie Stein, R. Michael Flynn, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard and Carl Messineo, for the roughly 150 people arrested, against Oakland, Alameda County, Sheriff Gregory Ahern and the police commanders. “Oakland police and Alameda County sheriff’s deputies detained the protesters for up to 28 hours” and “refused to let them use the bathroom or eat during much of that time,” she said that day. The complaint pleaded the 2004 policy clause by clause, including the requirement of probable cause for each individual arrest, the ban on dispersing a crowd before anyone has acted illegally, and the rule that encirclement and simultaneous arrest may happen only on the incident commander’s order, and it sought the sealing and destruction of fingerprints and photographs. Four months later, when police raided the Occupy Oakland camp on October 25, 2011 and about a hundred people were booked into Glenn Dyer and Santa Rita, she wrote the city’s and county’s lawyers the same day, citing the pending suit, to demand their immediate release. Judge Henderson, who had approved the port policy, certified the class without opposition on March 23, 2012, and in a joint filing the parties agreed that “It is undisputed that the 150 class members were not given an order or opportunity to disperse.” He granted preliminary approval on June 13, 2013 and final approval on September 9, 2013.

The defendants jointly paid $1,025,000, Alameda County’s share $175,000: $9,000 to each of the four class representatives, Daniel Spalding, Katharine Loncke, Danielle Lopez Green and Adrian Drummond-Cole, an equal share of $639,000 to every claimant with an approved claim, estimated at $4,500 to $5,000 each, and $350,000 to class counsel for fees, costs and administration, allocated separately from the class payments; neither side admitted anything. The agreement required Oakland police to cite and release eligible demonstration arrestees under Penal Code section 853.6 and Department General Order M-7, with the stated intention “to release citation-eligible arrestees as promptly as possible,” and provided that “No fingerprinting will be done as part of the citation and release process.” An officer who wanted to book a misdemeanor arrestee into jail had to document an articulable basis for a statutory exception, and no one could be booked on a bare felony charge of conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor. Alameda County agreed that mass arrestees would have toilet access at all times except in transit, that deputies would check handcuffs before transport and remove them at the jail as soon as it was safe, and that “Each vehicle used to transport mass arrestees to jail shall be equipped with a flexcuff cutter.” Those terms reaffirmed Oakland’s crowd-control policy and set out how quickly a nonviolent arrestee must move from street custody toward release, with concrete procedures for citation, transport, processing and release, and they ended the practice of jailing protesters for long periods without charges.

For the named plaintiffs and every class member with an approved claim, Oakland and Alameda County also agreed to seal and destroy the arrest records, including police reports, booking information and online entries, by permanent obliteration of every entry, with a copy of the court’s order going to the California Department of Justice. The relief was made “the equivalent of a determination of factual innocence pursuant to California Penal Code section 851.8,” and “Thereafter, the arrest shall be deemed not to have occurred,” so that those claimants could answer that the arrest had never happened. Oakland bound itself to keep following the 2004 policy, to meet and confer in good faith with the National Lawyers Guild’s Bay Area chapter and the ACLU of Northern California before any material change to it, and to the court’s continuing jurisdiction for four years, extendable by three on a material breach, with disputes going to Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler. “This was a perfectly legal demonstration,” Lederman said when the settlement was announced. “Our primary goal, and our clients’ primary goal, was to stop” the mass arrests, “so that people can be freer to organize on the streets.” That July, in Campbell v. City of Oakland, the suit over the Occupy raid and the November 2, 2011 port march in which she appeared for Timothy Scott Campbell, Oakland paid $1,170,000, sealed and destroyed the plaintiffs’ arrest records, and agreed to keep following the crowd-control policy as the Spalding settlement set it out.

The Veteran on the Pavement

Scott Olsen, twenty-four, had served two tours in Iraq as a Marine and was working as a computer network and systems administrator in San Francisco when he joined the Occupy Oakland crowd on the night of October 25, 2011, the day of the raid. He had been there about twenty minutes. Police fired tear gas, commanders ordered impact munitions used on anyone believed to be throwing things, and from about twenty feet an officer fired a lead-filled beanbag round that struck his head and partially shattered his skull. As other people ran to help him, Officer Robert Roche threw a CS Blast grenade toward the group gathered around him; its blast burned Olsen’s shoulder as he lay immobilized, and video shows bystanders carrying him away and shouting for a medic while no officer came or called for aid. At Highland Hospital he had neck and facial fractures from the fall and brain damage from a cerebral hemorrhage; he lost his speech and relearned it, and he still needs written notes to remember things.

The shooting violated the very crowd-control policy Lederman had helped overhaul ten years earlier, and that policy now supplied the standards for judging it: whether projectiles were aimed at an immediate threat, whether the crowd had received a lawful opportunity to disperse, and whether officers aided or endangered an injured person, with beanbag rounds barred for crowd control and never to be aimed at anyone’s head. She and Jim Chanin, with Julie Houk, represented Olsen in the suit filed in December 2012 against former Chief Howard Jordan, Roche, Sergeant Roland Holmgren and then-Captain Paul Figueroa, and on March 21, 2014 announced that Oakland would pay $4.5 million, $1.8 million from the city and the rest from its insurer; City Attorney Barbara Parker called the figure “fair.” Olsen stood outside City Hall and said, “I didn’t win part of my brain back that’s dead,” and “It was a hard recovery process, and this is part of the recovery process, but it’s definitely not everything.” Lederman said that “OPD has refused to get rid of so-called ‘less lethal’ weapons such as CS Blast grenades and lead-shot-filled beanbags” and that “until they do so, it is only a matter of time before we see another tragedy.” No other Bay Area city used tear gas or similar munitions during Occupy, and Oakland had already settled three other Occupy suits for a combined $2.8 million. The rules she had helped write into a court order measured the conduct they were written to prevent.

Closing the Mutual-Aid Gap

Oakland’s policy did not automatically bind an outside agency that entered the city under mutual aid. On June 1, 2020, during the protests after the murder of George Floyd, Oakland police asked Alameda County sheriff’s deputies for help at a downtown demonstration, and the deputies brought their own rules on impact munitions and explosive devices. Tosh Sears, fifty-two, was turning to leave when a deputy shot him in the hip with a 40-millimeter hard foam-tipped munition; Kierra Brown, twenty-two, was washing tear gas from people’s eyes when she tried to run the way officers ordered and was shot in the calf, then detained with guns pointed at her, and she has not regained full feeling in the leg. “There were a lot of points in time where I really thought that I was going to die,” Brown said. Jasmine Gaffett was shot at least twenty times as she ran. Lederman and R. Michael Flynn filed for the three of them on April 21, 2021, with twelve counts under the First and Fourth Amendments and state law, seeking to bar chemical agents, explosive grenades and impact munitions in crowds and to seal the named plaintiffs’ arrest records. Chief District Judge Richard Seeborg denied the motion to dismiss on October 1, 2021 except as to conspiracy and state-law discrimination counts, noting that the law was unclear whether an agency giving mutual aid must follow the requesting agency’s policies, and sent the parties to Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler; Chief LeRonne Armstrong had said in June 2021 that more than twenty of his own officers violated policy with tear gas in the summer of 2020.

The case was renamed Brown v. City of Oakland in June 2022 and settled that September with a shared $250,000 recovery and a permanent injunction that the court will enforce for five years against both Oakland police and the Sheriff’s Office, covering political demonstrations and any other crowd event in the county, including gatherings after sporting events. The injunction prohibits shotgun-fired impact munitions such as lead-filled beanbags into crowds, bars flashbang-style explosive grenades thrown into crowds, limits the Sheriff’s impact munitions and flashbangs to situations where they are necessary to defend against a threat to life or serious bodily injury or to bring a dangerous and unlawful situation under control, and requires de-escalation, warning and an opportunity to leave before anything is fired. It provides that picking up or throwing a chemical canister does not by itself justify shooting the person, a rule Oakland must spell out to its officers. “In this case they let mutual aid do their dirty work,” Lederman said. “We sat down and hammered out a crowd control policy in which Oakland agreed not to use these munitions for crowd control,” and “But every time there’s a resurgence of large demonstrations, OPD violates that agreement.” The deputies, she said, had been “shooting willy nilly into the crowd,” and the settlement “makes all the restrictions apply not only to political demonstrations but any type of crowd event in the county.” Flynn: “Even if someone does pose a grave danger, the injunction prohibits police from shooting into a crowd,” “especially when people are running from teargas.” Sears said, “I felt like a target in my own city, at the hands of people who are supposed to protect me,” and Brown, “Just seeing the way that the officers treated unarmed, innocent people was deeply painful.”

The Eye an Impact Round Destroyed

San José had no such policy. On May 29, 2020, the first night of its racial-justice demonstrations, the San José Police Department fired hundreds of projectile impact weapons into the downtown crowds, used up its entire supply, and made an emergency purchase to restock for the next day. M. Michael Acosta was a block from his home, walking back, when several officers fired at him and a round struck his face. “I am told it was Officer Yuen whose ‘less lethal’ munition hit me in the face, destroying my eye,” he said later. The eye was surgically removed after more than a month of pain; he underwent four surgeries to remove the eye globe and reconstruct the socket, missed weeks of work, and wears a prosthetic. Megan Swift was jabbed or shoved with batons at least seventeen times. Leslie Vasquez was shot in the groin and inner thighs with a 37-millimeter round while passively protesting; José Gustavo Flores Rodriguez was shot in the testicle and shoulder with a 40-millimeter round; Peter Allen was shoved to the ground with a baton. Officers did not report their targets and justifications as the department’s written policy required, internal investigations were suspended, and the way officers held the launchers blocked their body cameras.

Lederman was lead counsel in NAACP of San José/Silicon Valley v. City of San José, filed March 11, 2021 before Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton for the NAACP chapter, the San José Peace and Justice Center and eleven people, with R. Michael Flynn, Jim Chanin and Michael Harrison of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, who leads that firm’s civil-rights pro bono work. She examined the officer who fired, the commanders who authorized the weapons, the city’s training and crowd-control plans, and its broader use of projectiles and batons during the demonstrations, tying each injury to command and policy evidence: Acosta’s medical records documented the injury and the surgeries, street video and witnesses established where and when officers fired, and the plaintiffs’ expert and the video identified Officer Jared Yuen as the officer most likely to have shot him and showed that Acosta had committed no violent act. On September 24, 2021 the court largely denied the city’s motion to dismiss, left thirteen causes of action standing and deferred qualified immunity to summary judgment. On August 3, 2023 Judge Hamilton rejected the officers’ argument that they had meant only to disperse the crowd, holding that “it was clearly established by the Ninth Circuit in Nelson that an officer could not constitutionally shoot a projectile” at a non-threatening person; she denied qualified immunity to Yuen on Acosta’s claims and on his baton use against Allen, to Gaona on Flores, to Simonini on Vasquez, and to Tassio and Dwyer on their projectile claims, and sent to trial the claim that “the City of San Jose’s policy or custom of using PIW against non-threatening protestors was unconstitutional,” writing that “municipal liability may be imposed for a single decision by municipal policymakers.” Acosta’s Fourth and First Amendment, Bane Act, Ralph Act, assault and battery and negligence claims against Yuen, and his claims against the commander Jason Dwyer, Chief Ronnie Lopez and the city, were set for a jury. “This ruling to allow the case to proceed to a jury trial is a victory for those who were attacked indiscriminately by police,” Lederman said.

The city settled the whole case before Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler on August 29, 2023, and on September 12, 2023 the San José City Council approved $3.35 million: $2.9 million to Acosta and $450,000 shared by Swift and three other plaintiffs, concrete relief for all five, without an admission, and the court dismissed the action with prejudice on October 19. “I’m glad the lawsuit has been resolved, but no amount of money could ever return to me what has been taken,” Acosta said. “Every aspect of my life has been impacted, and not a day goes by when I am not reminded of the loss of my eye.” Lederman said the department had “used dangerous impact munitions and batons to brutalize protestors for hours,” that “During the 2020 George Floyd protests nationwide, more than 115 people were shot in the head with impact munitions,” and that “When police officers are allowed to shoot so-called ‘less lethal’ munitions into crowds, tragedies are sure to result.”

Weapon, Range, Target, Order

Reasonableness turns on the munition, the distance, the target, the warning, the officer, the order, the available alternatives and the resulting injury, and Lederman’s cases examine the particular use of force and the circumstances around it rather than treating every device within a broad weapon category as legally identical. A 40-millimeter foam-tipped round fired at a man’s hip as he turns to leave, a lead-filled beanbag fired from a shotgun at a head twenty feet away, and a wooden dowel fired at a retreating crowd are different acts with different justifications, and the medical history, the street video and the command and training evidence establish, for each one, the physical consequence, the place and sequence, and why officers possessed and deployed the weapon. The San José case moved upward from the impact on one person to the decisions that put projectiles into a crowd. She also connected the litigation to California Assembly Bill 48: “Litigation such as this case contributed to the state legislature passing AB 48 in 2022,” she said, “which greatly restricts use of impact munitions to disperse protestors, a big step in the right direction.” The statute, Penal Code section 13652, provides that kinetic energy projectiles and chemical agents shall not be used by any law enforcement agency to disperse any assembly, protest or demonstration; permits them only by trained officers, when objectively reasonable to defend against a threat to life or serious bodily injury or to bring an objectively dangerous and unlawful situation under control, and only after de-escalation has been tried, repeated audible warnings given, a reasonable opportunity to disperse allowed and efforts made to separate violent from nonviolent people; forbids aiming projectiles indiscriminately into a crowd or at the head, neck or other vital organs; bars their use solely for a curfew violation, a verbal threat or noncompliance with a directive; and leaves every agency free to adopt stricter rules. The statute did not replace the settlement. It carried the lessons the litigation drew from injured bodies into statewide operating rules.

Payment by the Hour

Camarlinghi v. Santa Clara County addressed a different custody: detention in the county jail after prosecutors had already declined to charge. Dylan Camarlinghi was arrested on February 9, 2020 over an alleged altercation at a friend’s home; the district attorney declined to prosecute on February 11; the Sheriff’s Office released him on February 14, about three days later, and told him neither why he had been held nor that the case had been dropped. He learned of the declination about a year afterward and sued on April 26, 2021. The practice reached hundreds of people, some held as long as four days, until their arraignment dates, and the county did not defend it. Godwin Ugochukwuikeusan, pulled over while living out of his car with his pregnant girlfriend and told he was wanted on a warrant, lost his phone, hers and the car and was released the next day: “I had jobs lined up that I couldn’t get, I was homeless, and had no financial means to get another phone for me and my girlfriend.” Lederman’s co-counsel Dami Animashaun described how the harm stayed hidden: “They don’t tell you why you’re released; they don’t tell you ‘we’re releasing you three days after the DA dropped the case.’” “No class member knew they were harmed.”

Judge Edward J. Davila appointed Lederman, Akeeb Dami Animashaun, and Janet Herold and Lucy Bansal of Justice Catalyst Law as class counsel for a class of 244 people who were not released within a reasonable time after the district attorney’s decision: a first subclass detained from twelve to twenty-four hours after the declination and a second held twenty-four hours or longer, in both cases people “for whom no holds, warrants, or other reasons justified their continued detention at the time the DA declined prosecution,” between April 26, 2018 and April 26, 2021, on a single due process claim under section 1983. The county agreed in August 2022 to pay $2,375,000, non-reversionary and without admission, and on December 16, 2022 the court approved the settlement as “fair, adequate, and reasonable.” The settlement used an hourly distribution formula tied to the time each person remained confined after prosecutors declined charges: class members detained from twelve to twenty-four hours received $250 for each compensable hour, and people held beyond twenty-four hours received $250 per hour for the first twelve compensable hours and $295 for each later hour. After $395,000 for fees, expenses, administration and a $20,000 award to Camarlinghi, whom the court called “a model class representative,” approximately $1.98 million, 84 percent of the fund, remained for participating class members. No class member objected or opted out.

Due Process Before Campus Exclusion

On May 30, 2024, more than a hundred officers in riot gear cleared the pro-Palestinian encampment that students had kept since May 1 in an unpaved lot at the base of the UC Santa Cruz campus. Students and faculty who were not in the camp gathered to protest, dispersal orders were unclear or inaudible, and people were arrested for failing to disperse, zip-tied and held for hours without bathrooms; some were hospitalized. Professor Christine Hong, who teaches critical race and ethnic studies and literature: “The officers forced us together so tightly that some of us were dry heaving” from batons thrust into their abdomens, and “Officers in full riot gear grabbed people by the neck.” Immediately after the arrests the university banned more than 110 students and faculty members from campus, by identical form notices until the forms ran out and then by word of mouth, some with no notice at all, including people who had never been arrested or charged. The exclusions took effect on the spot and cut off housing, classes, jobs, meal plans, health care, libraries and the rooms where final examinations were being given. Laaila Irshad, an undergraduate: “I was a Resident Assistant living and working in campus housing so the ban was devastating,” and “I failed my school courses as I could not access my computer, attend classes, or complete assignments.” Hannah (Elio) Ellutzi, on the honor roll for the two previous quarters, missed an appointment, lost access to home, library and notes during finals, and watched grades fall. “The bans were incredibly punitive and profoundly unfair,” Lederman said. “They went into effect on the spot.” “On-campus residents were rendered homeless.” “Academic performance suffered.”

Lederman joined the ACLU of Northern California and Thomas Seabaugh in Ellutzi v. Regents of the University of California, filed September 9, 2024 in Santa Cruz County Superior Court for Ellutzi, Irshad and Hong, with a motion for a preliminary injunction on September 26, the first day of classes. California Penal Code section 626.4 permits a campus to withdraw consent to remain for up to two weeks only within defined limits, ordinarily after a hearing, and otherwise only on an individualized determination that the person’s continued presence poses a substantial threat of significant injury, together with a hearing process. Chessie Thacher of the ACLU put the defect simply: “UCSC issued these bans en masse without making the findings required by law.” Seabaugh: “Our clients did not engage in conduct that posed a threat of significant injury to anyone or anything.” The litigation secured significant concessions from the university. UC Santa Cruz agreed not to exclude a student, employee or faculty member from campus without an individualized finding and due process, a strict person-specific standard that turned a mass exclusion into a rule requiring a finding about one person at a time.

The Phone Seized at a Fire Drill

Two weeks after the lawsuit was announced, on October 1, 2024, campus police seized Laaila Irshad’s phone as she stood outside her dorm in her pajamas during a nighttime fire drill. The warrant, obtained on the strength of a vandalism allegation from the encampment months earlier that had never been referred for prosecution, reached years of photographs, messages, contacts, searches, location data, political associations and communications with counsel about the pending civil-rights case, going back to the fifth grade. Lederman’s team, with the ACLU and Seabaugh, moved to quash on October 11, 2024 and again by petition on March 5, 2025, under the First and Fourth Amendments, California’s Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the state constitution. The problem was particularity: a phone can contain a person’s life, but a warrant must identify the suspected conduct, the relevant information and a justified time period. “They’ve had it for six months. It’s not contraband, and there’s no allegation that it was used in the commission of a crime,” Seabaugh told the court; “There’s no plausible scenario where an allegation of vandalism in a political protest gives rise to a search this broad.” The university’s lawyer, Victoria Degtyareva, answered that the warrant was of the kind filed across the country, that the timing reflected when probable cause was established, that California’s strict time limits apply to data seized rather than searched, and that “Ms. Irshad’s phone is not being searched because she’s a protester.”

Students filled the Santa Cruz courtroom on April 14 and the Watsonville courtroom on April 30, 2025. Judge Erika Ziegenhorn substantially narrowed the search: the Santa Cruz County Superior Court limited it to a thirty-day period surrounding the alleged incident and ordered the university to seal and destroy the material outside that period and every communication with counsel. The order left the warrant in place for that window and limited what the government could retain and examine. “When the police can search activists’ personal cell phones without limits, freedom of speech is in jeopardy,” Lederman said the next day. “Yesterday, the court substantially limited the scope of this phone search,” “even while the university police continued to insist that there is an active criminal investigation.” Irshad had never been charged.

Backwater Bridge

Her reach extends beyond California. In 2016 she helped found the Water Protector Legal Collective, the National Lawyers Guild’s legal team at the Oceti Sakowin camp near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, with a round-the-clock presence for the people resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline; it is now an Indigenous-led legal organization. On the night of November 20 into November 21, 2016, officers of Morton County and other agencies confronted people at Backwater Bridge, on treaty land just north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, without warning or a chance to disperse, and used impact munitions, explosive tear-gas grenades, chemical agents, a water cannon and fire hoses in freezing weather; more than 200 people were injured. On November 28 she and Brandy Toelupe filed Dundon v. Kirchmeier in the District of North Dakota, a class action for everyone hurt that night, seeking an immediate injunction against the munitions, the water cannon and the chemical agents. Vanessa Dundon, of the Navajo Nation, was struck in the eye by a tear-gas canister fired into the crowd and lost part of her vision; Jade Kalikolehuaokakalani Wool was burned and hit by shrapnel when two grenades exploded near her head; David Demo was filming when he was hosed and struck in the hand, breaking bones; Israel Hoagland-Lynn was shot in the back of the head while helping two wounded people and needed seventeen staples; Noah Michael Treanor was hosed while praying and then shot in the head as he lay on the ground. “The civil rights violations that night were deliberate and punitive,” Lederman said. “It is only a matter of luck that no one has been killed.” “This must stop.” She was lead attorney in Dundon as the damages and injunctive claims went forward in Bismarck, with the ACLU as amicus on the appeal, and while the appeal was pending it came out that Energy Transfer Partners had hired the security firm TigerSwan to surveil the movement and run a disinformation campaign against it.

A Dispersal Order Two Hours Earlier and Blocks Away

The newest case is the oldest question. On June 27, 2026, San Francisco police broke up Stud Alley, an unofficial Pride street party in SoMa that began on Kissling Street and moved to Washburn Street, and arrested twenty people, two on Kissling who were released without charge and eighteen on Washburn at about 11:50 p.m. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins charged all eighteen in July with disobeying a dispersal order, unlawful assembly and resisting arrest. Lederman represented two of them. The department’s own dispatch log showed the eighteen arrests at 11:52 to 11:54 p.m. and dispersal orders read at midnight and 12:04 a.m.; more than a dozen body-camera videos and an internal investigation showed no order on Washburn before the arrests; the June 28 report had credited Sergeant Williams and Lieutenant Adrian Payne with giving orders, Payne said on July 22 that he had given none and that Lieutenant Conroy Tam had, and Tam said he had given none before the skirmish line moved because an order would have warned the DJ to move his equipment. “These charges are just completely nonsensical,” Lederman said. “They issued an order to disperse from Kissling Street,” and “The idea that then people were supposed to know that they were disobeying that order by being blocks away,” and “two hours later, is just absurd.” “We fully expect to beat these charges, which are completely baseless.” On September 14, 2026, on the defense demurrer and motions to dismiss, visiting Superior Court Judge Brian Hill threw out every charge. “At the end of the day, there’s a very strict requirement that there be a directive to disperse,” he said, “And the fact that one happened an hour and a half before in a different location” was not enough: “I don’t think that has that kind of carryover.” Unlawful assembly requires an illegal gathering or an imminent threat of violence, and the police evidence showed neither at a party of more than a hundred people dancing in the street; he found at most “minimal resistance,” dismissed the resisting count “in the interest of justice,” and added, “But none of those acts are alleged to have been committed by the people before the court.” Several of the eighteen had lost jobs over the charges, and all but one had no record. The dismissal ended the case.

Evidence and Individual Relief

Lederman builds each matter from evidence capable of surviving resistance from police agencies and government officials: body-camera and street video, dispatch and command records, weapon logs, medical documentation, arrest and release times, dispersal announcements, policy text and witness testimony. In San José that meant the video and the expert who put Officer Yuen at the trigger; in Oakland the joint stipulation that no one on Sixth Avenue was told to disperse; on Washburn Street the dispatch log with the arrests minutes before the first order; on Seventeenth Street the timing of the megaphone announcements against the movement of the lines. Those materials allow a settlement or injunction to specify what must change and how compliance can be tested.

Her class work also preserves individual differences. Age, injury, time in custody, medical treatment and loss remain measurable even when common police conduct supports collective relief, which is why the Hill Bomb class has subclasses for girls, boys and adults, why the Santa Clara formula paid by the hour, and why the Spalding fund paid an equal share to each approved claimant while the four named plaintiffs who carried the case received $9,000 each. A single proceeding addresses a police agency’s repeated action while compensation and protection stay connected to each person affected.

The work spans emergency movement defense, trial preparation, class certification, negotiation and implementation, and the remedies take different forms: monetary payments, written operational rules, enforceable injunctions, faster release procedures, individualized due process and continuing limits on crowd-control force. Each depends on a different record and a different enforcement mechanism, from claimant evidence and class definitions to notice, supervision and compliance review: the Oakland policy rests on a court that retained jurisdiction with no end date; the Spalding terms on a four-year enforcement period, a meet-and-confer duty and a magistrate judge for disputes; the Brown injunction on five years of federal enforcement; the Santa Clara settlement on claim forms and an hourly ledger; the Santa Cruz order on sealing and destruction.

West Coast Protest Law

Lederman graduated from Cornell University and New College of California School of Law and has practiced since 1987; she is admitted in California, in the United States District Court for the District of North Dakota, and in the Eighth and Ninth Circuits. She served as president of the National Lawyers Guild’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, the chapter that drafted the Oakland crowd-control policy with the ACLU, and in that role, in May and June 2015, she went on KPFA and wrote in Truthout, in “Why Oakland’s Crackdown on Protest Is Sure to Fail,” that the city’s new ban on nighttime street marches would produce more broken windows rather than fewer. She received the Guild’s Unsung Hero award. She is a member of the National Police Accountability Project, a founding member of the Oakland Law Collaborative, and a founder of the Water Protector Legal Collective, the legal team at Standing Rock that is now an Indigenous-led legal organization.

On August 1, 2023 the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund announced that she had joined it as Senior Counsel to open and lead its West Coast office in Oakland, where she leads the West Coast operations of its Center for Protest Law & Litigation. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Fund said “there is no better litigator to anchor this work than Rachel,” “who has devoted her career to advocating for social change movements.” Lederman said, “I am thrilled to join forces with PCJF, with whom I have collaborated and whose work I have admired for decades,” and then: “Together we will continue to fight back against attacks on the fundamental right to dissent, the criminalization of youth and erosion of civil rights.” Her work there includes emergency movement defense, impact litigation, class actions, policy enforcement, appellate advocacy, and training for lawyers responding to mass arrests and protest policing. The Hill Bomb class, Acosta, Olsen, Sears and Brown, the Oscar Grant protesters, the Santa Clara detainees, the UC Santa Cruz students and the Stud Alley eighteen belong to different generations and faced San Francisco, San José, Oakland, Alameda County, Santa Clara County and the University of California, and in each case the court was asked the same things: what an officer knew about a child, why a projectile was fired at one face, how many hours a person remained after prosecution ended, what finding supported a campus exclusion, and which part of a phone a warrant lawfully reached. Government may manage a crowd, operate a jail, protect a campus or investigate an offense. It must still justify force, arrest, custody, exclusion and search one individual at a time.