In a rebuke to San Francisco Police mass arrest tactics, a Superior Court Judge has ruled in favor of bicyclists who were rounded up at the July 1997 Critical Mass ride.

In the only case to come to trial from that mass arrest, bicyclist Howard Besser charged that police had illegally declared an unlawful assembly and had arbitrarily arrested 100 bicyclists, and that under orders of Mayor Willie Brown they had tried to permanently confiscate all the arrestees' bicycles.

Despite a strong attempt by the City Attorney's Office to win the case (including an Appeal of Besser's December 1998 Small Claims Court victory, and a full-day Superior Court Trial involving 9 witnesses), this past Thursday San Francisco Superior Court Judge Thomas Mellon awarded Besser $1,000 plus court costs.  (This is a judge who, 18 months later made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle [11/25/00] when the Public Defenders Office demanded that he be removed from all criminal cases because he was habitually pro-prosecution.)  The judge noted that, despite the difficult situation facing police that night, they had no right to arbitrarily arrest a group of bicycle riders solely because they were on a Critical Mass ride.  Before such a mass arrest takes place, arrestees must be breaking the law and be audibly warned to leave or be arrested.

"It's about time the courts rebuked Willie Brown for his gestapo-like tactics," declared Besser, a faculty member at both UCLA and UC Berkeley. "The police can't arbitrarily round up people and arrest them just because they oppose some of the Mayor's policies.  They can't handcuff and lock people up in order to stifle dissent, knowing full well that the Courts or the D.A. will drop the charges later. And as the D.A. told the Mayor right after this happened, you can't permanently confiscate peoples' bikes just because the Mayor doesn't like Critical Mass."

Besser pointed out that the monthly Critical Mass rides had caused little controversy for many years until the summer of 1997. "Suddenly the Mayor decided that Critical Mass caused traffic jams, and in his typical bombastic and imperious way he tried to outlaw the ride and even developed plans to arrest all 5,000 people involved. He ignored the fact that cars are the real cause of traffic jams, and that his own escorted vehicle and escorts for his visiting dignitaries cause many more traffic jams than Critical Mass ever has. And that a single stalled car on the Bay Bridge will block traffic for hours, whereas the Critical Mass inconvenience to motorists can be measured in minutes."

"The Mayor made a big deal about the July 1997 ride, then he went on to dabble in other things. Though the Mayor professed that Critical Mass had suddenly become intolerable, the monthly rides have been pretty much the same for a decade. The controversy was that Brown suddenly decided to make them controversial. It's interesting that the monthly rides have barely made the papers since summer of 1997, yet the rides themselves are almost exactly the same. The only thing that's changed is where Brown focuses his attention."

"The DA handling the recent pie-throwing case stated the City's support for peaceful forms of protest.  If the City Attorney believed that as well, she'd apologize to the 100 people illegally arrested in that Critical Mass ride and order the police department to quit using mass sweeps of innocent protesters to stifle dissent that the Mayor doesn't like."

Despite the Court victory, Besser was upset that he was embroiled in the process for 20 months.  "It's amazing how time consuming the legal proceedings in this case have been. I spent more than 350 hours and hundreds of dollars fighting this. None of the other arrestees were able to spend the time it took to fight this.  In December the Small Claims Court awarded me $500, and the City even appealed that award, costing them much more than $500 and costing me another 100 hours of effort.  This whole process has been a waste of San Francisco taxpayers' money, all in an attempt to keep an Imperious Mayor from looking bad. But the courts have slapped his hands for violation of basic rights of free speech and assembly, and his liberal facade is crumbling. People are finally beginning to see that the Emperor has no clothes. And, with apologies to the Biotic Baking Brigade, I think that the courts have shown that he has egg on his face."
 

For further information, contact Howard Besser at (310) 825-8975 or howard@sims.berkeley.edu, or see the website at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~howard/CriticalMass/ .