San Francisco’s district attorney on Wednesday announced felony charges against several people in connection with separate incidents, including vandalism, that happened during Pride weekend.
A melee at the end of last Friday’s Trans March resulted in four people being arrested and charged. According to District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, the confrontation happened, in part, because officers were trying to arrest a pair who they say had been spray-painting pink messages on private property, city-operated Flock cameras and neighborhood security cameras.
“This was pre-planned activity,” Jenkins said. “This was something that these individuals set out to do. They were prepared. They had an agenda, which was to disrupt law enforcement’s ability to do its job, which is why they targeted surveillance cameras and Flock cameras.”
The arrests happened where the march finished, just outside the former Compton’s Cafeteria historic site in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood. During Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting, Supervisor Jackie Fielder made reference to that when she announced a letter of inquiry to the police department over its handling of the situation.
“The images of police in full tactical gear harken back to the Compton’s Cafeteria riot of 1966 in which trans women and drag queens were protesting police brutality,” Fielder said. “I have questions about the decision making to deploy officers in full tactical gear.”
According to Jenkins, while officers were trying to arrest two people for the vandalism, several others tried to prevent those arrests. That’s when two others were taken into custody and charged with resisting or obstructing the police. Jenkins said one of them spit on an officer.
“We need to be clear, again, to flesh out all of the facts,” Jenkins said. “People are still doing that. But some of the facts have been left out of the discussion, which is the conduct that now has been charged, of people spitting on police.”
A shooting on Saturday and a stabbing on Sunday were not necessarily connected to Pride events, Jenkins said.