Rachel Lederman

The Line Across Seventeenth Street

San Francisco officers closed both ends of one Mission District block and arrested the people inside. Rachel Lederman represents plaintiffs in the Hill Bomb case who allege that police lacked a lawful basis to take each person into custody.

The Dolores Hill Bomb is an informal downhill skateboarding gathering organized largely by young people. On July 8, 2023, spectators and skaters assembled around Dolores Park while San Francisco police placed barricades along part of the route. Later that evening, officers moved south and formed police lines around people on the 3500 block of Seventeenth Street.

At approximately 8:40 p.m., police began arresting the enclosed group. The certified federal class contains about 113 people, including eighty-one children ages twelve through seventeen. The plaintiffs include teenagers, young adults, passersby, and people who say they had followed earlier dispersal instructions or arrived after those instructions were given.

Lederman serves as lead counsel. The dispute concerns individualized probable cause: whether an officer can arrest every person caught between police lines without a basis for believing that person committed an offense, even when police are responding to violence or an unlawful assembly.

Individual Arrests of Minors

San Francisco argues that officers confronted an unlawful assembly after violence, property damage, and repeated orders to disperse. The plaintiffs contend that the police created the arrested group by sealing the block, leaving no route out, and then treating proximity as probable cause.

The distinction is especially consequential for children. Declarations describe teenagers held in plastic restraints, seated for hours on pavement and buses as the night became cold and windy, with little or no access to food, water, toilets, warm clothing, or their parents. The last child was released after four in the morning. No charges were filed against the class members.

The Fourth Amendment requires justification for each seizure. Crowd-control commands can address a group, but arrest still attaches to a person. Video, dispersal announcements, officer locations, timing, parent communications, and the routes available from Seventeenth Street therefore matter person by person.

San Francisco’s Mass-Arrest Litigation

Lederman filed the federal action in December 2023 with the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, the Community Law Office, and other counsel. The complaint sought damages and forward-looking relief under federal and California law.

In June 2024, Magistrate Judge Lisa Cisneros allowed substantial Fourth Amendment theories to proceed while narrowing other claims. The court later permitted amendment, coordinated the related R.P. action, and supervised discovery involving police video, policies, communications, and the arrest and detention of minors.

On October 30, 2025, the court certified a class covering everyone arrested on that block and created subclasses for minor girls, minor boys, and adults where confinement and damages questions differed. Lederman and the plaintiffs’ team became class counsel. Certification transformed many individual arrests into one proceeding without erasing the separate circumstances of age, processing, custody, and loss.

A Trial Date after Summary Judgment

The parties filed competing summary-judgment and expert motions in 2026. At the June hearing, the city asked the court to decide the case without a jury. Lederman argued that video, testimony, dispersal orders, and the accounts of children and parents left central facts disputed—especially whether officers had supplied a lawful opportunity to leave and what they knew about each arrestee.

As of the docket update on July 11, 2026, the case remained active with no final merits ruling. A pretrial conference is scheduled for October 9, jury selection for October 16, and a twelve-day trial beginning October 19.

The schedule reflects the practical burden of class litigation involving young people. The court arranged for possible remote testimony by class members living or attending school outside the Bay Area. The individual witness remains central even after the case becomes a class action.

The Eye an Impact Round Destroyed

During the 2020 racial-justice demonstrations in San José, police fired hundreds of impact munitions into downtown crowds. M. Michael Acosta was walking home when an officer’s projectile struck his face and destroyed one eye. He underwent four surgeries to remove the eye globe and reconstruct the socket.

Lederman was one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in NAACP of San José/Silicon Valley v. City of San José. Lederman and the team 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.

San José approved a $3.35 million settlement in September 2023. Acosta received $2.9 million, and four other plaintiffs shared $450,000. The agreement resolved the action without an admission and compensated injuries caused by impact munitions.

Weapon, Range, Target, Order

A weapon category does not establish whether a particular use of force was reasonable. The legal inquiry requires the munition, distance, target, warning, officer, order, available alternatives, and injury.

Acosta’s medical records documented the loss of his eye and four surgeries. Street video and witnesses established where and when the officers fired. Records and testimony about command and training showed who authorized the weapons and how they were deployed.

Lederman also connected the litigation to California Assembly Bill 48, which restricted the use of impact munitions and chemical agents for crowd dispersal.

Oakland Crowd-Control Policy

Lederman’s Oakland crowd-control work dates to April 2003, when police used wooden projectiles, beanbags, motorcycles, and other force against antiwar demonstrators and longshore workers at the Port of Oakland. The resulting federal litigation produced compensation and a detailed crowd-control policy.

The policy limited declarations of unlawful assembly to illegal conduct or a clear and present danger of imminent violence. It required repeated, audible dispersal announcements and safe routes out before arrest. It barred indiscriminate firing into crowds and restricted beanbags to identified people presenting an imminent risk. It also prohibited intentional motorcycle strikes and the crowd use of specified weapons.

The resulting policy provided written standards for later police operations, including dispersal announcements, safe exit routes, weapon restrictions, and limits on indiscriminate force.

Scott Olsen at Occupy Oakland

In October 2011, Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen stood in an Occupy Oakland crowd when a police projectile struck his head. He suffered a fractured skull and permanent brain injury. Video showed people moving to help him and an officer throwing an explosive device toward the group gathered around his body.

Lederman and Jim Chanin represented Olsen. Oakland resolved the case for $4.5 million in 2014. The city’s own crowd-control policy supplied concrete standards for judging the officers’ conduct: whether they fired projectiles at an immediate threat, gave the crowd a lawful opportunity to disperse, and aided or endangered an injured person.

Olsen’s case applied the crowd-control policy to the specific use of force shown on video and to the injuries documented in his medical records.

Closing the Mutual-Aid Gap

Oakland’s policy did not automatically bind every outside agency that entered the city to provide mutual aid. During the 2020 protests, Alameda County sheriff’s deputies used impact munitions and explosive devices under a different set of rules.

Lederman represented demonstrators Joe Sears and Walter Brown in litigation that closed that gap. The 2022 settlement provided a shared $250,000 recovery and a five-year federal injunction governing both Oakland police and Alameda County deputies.

The injunction prohibited shotgun-fired impact munitions into crowds, restricted flashbang-like explosive grenades, required de-escalation, warning, and opportunity to leave, and clarified that picking up or throwing a chemical canister does not automatically justify shooting the person. The rules apply to political demonstrations and other crowd events, including gatherings after sporting events.

Oscar Grant Protest Mass Arrests

After a November 2010 protest concerning the sentence imposed for the killing of Oscar Grant, Oakland police surrounded approximately 150 demonstrators. The parties later agreed that the group had not received an order or opportunity to disperse before police lines closed.

Arrestees remained handcuffed on the street, buses, and in holding areas for fourteen to twenty-four hours. Lederman served as lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the class action. A $1.025 million settlement provided $9,000 to each named plaintiff and estimated payments of $4,500 to $5,000 for other eligible class members, while allocating fees and costs separately.

The agreement required police to cite and release people arrested at demonstrations more quickly and reaffirmed Oakland’s crowd-control policy. It contained no admission of liability, but it set deadlines for moving a nonviolent arrestee from street custody toward release.

Compensation for Extended Detention

Camarlinghi v. Santa Clara County addressed detention after prosecutors had already declined to charge. The class contained 244 people who were not released within a reasonable time after the district attorney’s decision.

The court appointed Lederman, Akeeb Animashaun, Janet Herold, and Lucy Bansal as class counsel. It approved a $2.375 million non-reversionary settlement in December 2022. After fees, expenses, administration, and the class representative’s award, approximately $1.98 million remained for participating class members.

The settlement used an hourly distribution formula. Class members detained from twelve to twenty-four hours received $250 for each compensable hour. People held beyond twenty-four hours received $250 per hour for the first twelve compensable hours and $295 for each later hour. No class member objected or opted out.

Individual Findings Before Campus Bans

In May 2024, UC Santa Cruz banned more than 110 students and faculty members from campus after arrests at a pro-Palestinian encampment. The exclusions took effect immediately. Students lost access to housing, classes, jobs, meal plans, health care, libraries, and places to take final examinations.

Lederman joined the ACLU of Northern California and Thomas Seabaugh in challenging the bans. California Penal Code section 626.4 permits temporary withdrawal of consent to remain on campus only within defined limits and requires an individualized determination that continued presence poses a substantial threat of significant injury, together with a hearing process.

UC Santa Cruz agreed not to exclude a student, employee, or faculty member from campus without an individualized finding and due process.

Challenge to a Phone Warrant

Laaila Irshad was a named plaintiff in the campus-ban suit and a resident adviser. On October 1, 2024, campus police seized her phone during a nighttime fire drill, two weeks after the lawsuit was announced. The warrant reached years of photographs, messages, contacts, searches, political associations, and communications with counsel.

Lederman’s team challenged the warrant under the First and Fourth Amendments, California’s Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and state constitutional protections. 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.

In April 2025, the Santa Cruz County Superior Court limited the search to a thirty-day period surrounding the alleged incident and ordered the university to seal and destroy material outside that period and attorney communications.

Practice and Leadership

Lederman has practiced since 1987. She graduated from Cornell University and New College of California School of Law, served as president of the National Lawyers Guild’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter, worked with the National Police Accountability Project, helped found the Oakland Law Collaborative, and co-founded the Water Protector Legal Collective.

She now serves as Senior Counsel for the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund and directs West Coast operations for its Center for Protest Law & Litigation. Her work 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, and the UC Santa Cruz students involve different generations and institutions. Each matter tests government action against the rights of the individual people affected.