Cops & Robbers

It's not as fun as it sounds. The street's been a ruckus lately, and last night things came to a head between a uniformed officer and a civilian outside American Apparel.

Around 5:40 last night, we heard a confrontation between police and civilians happening in front of American Apparel. According to an eyewitness account, this is what happened:

I heard raised male voices from outside and went to see. It it was a white male in a red hoodie arguing intensely with a cop. Something about a parking space / parking meter. People were gathering and pointing. Suddenly they (the cop and the guy) were on one another, struggling and sort of wrestling--I honestly can't say who leapt/swung first--and they bounced off the glass of a storefront (this was all across the street from the BS) and the hoodie guy lost his balance/grip. The cop hadn't had his gun drawn at any point, but had his stick out, and once he broke free of the guy he started wailing on him pretty hard with the stick. The guy fell, curled up, and the cop wailed on him a little more (with one particularly resonant strike to the spine), then people on the street started rushing the cop and trying to get him to stop. Most notable was a roughly 30-year-old woman with a few shopping bags (black hair, done up but in a not-too-flashy kind of way). She ran at the cop yelling and all, leading the soon street-wide vocal objection, but at the exact same moment one regular cop car and one unmarked cop car rolled up and the cop finally stopped wailing on the guy and they handcuffed him (the guy in the hoodie) and brought him away. Just another evening in the Haight, right?

A call to the SFPD Park Station this morning confirmed there was an arrest made at 1615 Haight last night around 5:45. A station spokesperson said the arrest was of "a homeless guy" for failure to comply with an officer's requests. --------------- With reporting by Colin Winnette and Lauren O'Niell.