Photo: Michael Macor / SFC
A federal magistrate tentatively approved a $1.3 million settlement of a lawsuit filed by Occupy Oakland protesters who said they were corralled by police outside the downtown YMCA before being unfairly arrested and held in jail for hours.
In signing off on the deal last week, U.S. Magistrate Nathanael Cousins in San Francisco also granted preliminary class-action status, meaning the eight plaintiffs who sued the city of Oakland and Alameda County would share the money with roughly 400 people who allege they were unlawfully arrested on Jan. 28, 2012.
City and county leaders have already approved the payout, the latest in a series of settlements of lawsuits alleging police wrongdoing during mass arrests, court records show. Plaintiffs in the case, however, need to sign off on it before it becomes final.
“It’s the job of Mayor (Libby) Schaaf and the City Council to make sure that the Oakland Police Department understands the basis of this case, and that it requires that the police end the indiscriminate mass arrest of people taking part in a peaceful demonstration,” said Dan Siegel, an attorney for the plaintiffs who ran against Schaaf in last year’s election.
Siegel said Police Chief Sean Whent, who became interim chief in 2013, deserved “a little bit of credit” for making changes since the height of the Occupy movement.
Demonstrators in some recent police-brutality protests were given a chance to disperse, Siegel noted, and those who didn’t were cited and quickly released from the scene, “without forcing them to spend a couple of days at Santa Rita (Jail in Dublin).”
The lawsuit said hundreds of people were unlawfully arrested after law enforcement officers “kettled,” or surrounded, them outside the YMCA on Broadway. Among those taken into custody were protesters, reporters, medics, legal observers and bystanders who were corralled by officers who didn’t give a dispersal order, the suit claimed.
Arrestees were held for as long as 85 hours, said the suit.
The mass arrest outside the YMCA happened hours after protesters tried to take over the vacant Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center several blocks away and use it as a base for activism similar to a shuttered encampment outside City Hall.
Among the plaintiffs was Sri Louise Coles, who had suffered a golf-ball-size welt to her jaw from a bag of lead shot fired by Oakland police during a 2003 antiwar demonstration at the Port of Oakland. She sued the city, which settled for $210,000.
Coles and seven others in the latest case will each receive $9,000 and their attorneys will get $350,000, Cousins said. The settlement mandates that the plaintiffs’ arrest records along with police reports and other materials be sealed and destroyed.
