UPDATED VERSION Three protesters who interrupted Mayor Ed Lee’s speech at the Fairmont Hotel yesterday were arrested and charged with trespassing and “disturbing a public meeting,” police confirmed today.
Officer Albie Esparza told me he didn’t immediately have the names of the three, but according to Facebook posts from the Justice for Mario Woods coalition, two of them were Equipto Ilyich Sato and Max LeYoung.
A third protester was charged with disturbing the meeting, which wasn’t public but a private breakfast sponsored by the San Francisco Business Times.
I just got off the phone with Betty Mackey, the third protester, who said she had paid for tickets to the event, and was on her way out the door with Sato and LeYoung when the three were arrested.
The charges are curious: First of all, it’s very rare for hecklers who interrupt a public official to get charged with a crime. It’s also strange to say they were “trespassing,” since they would have needed a ticket to get in (I’ve been to these things, you can’t just show up at the door).
Mackey told me that she had bought four tickets, at a total price of $460. So they weren’t exactly trespassing.
And if disturbing a “public” meeting is a crime now, then the sheriffs who monitor the Board of Supes are going to be awfully busy.
The protesters were there to voice the Woods coalitions demands that the mayor fire Chief Greg Suhr, file charges against the officers who killed Woods, and bring in an independent outside investigator to review the incident.
Lee has consistently supported Suhr, and while he has asked the Justice Department to review police policies on use of force, he has not asked for an investigation into this particular shooting.
Mackey said Sato asked the mayor some questions about homelessness when Fairmont security told him to leave. “We were never trespassing. I was filming it. Max LeYoung never said a word.”
A very polite person from the Business Times asked them to stop interrupting the mayor, and they did, she said. “I was just standing in the back.”
After a few minutes, she said, the three made the decision to leave the room. They were walking out of the hotel when police arrived.
“They told us we had to leave and we were leaving,” she said. “We weren’t doing anything.”
And yet all three were arrested, cuffed, and taken to Central Station, where they were cited and released.
