SFPD accused of discrimination in stepping up enforcement on a hip-hop, mostly black nightclub
The 2-3 blocks on Broadway on which this club resides are just a total dumpster fire of trashy nightclubs and strip clubs, but cops singled this one out for...reasons?
First, they appear to have fabricated (?!) a fight that supposedly took place in the club with guns and ****:
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To hear San Francisco police tell it, Dec. 13, 2014 was a terrifying night inside North Beach nightclub Hue.
According to statements and letters from command staff at Central Station, it began when multiple fights roiled the largest dance club on a bustling block of Broadway. At the center of the action was a woman in white. And then things escalated: two combatants, both of them reported as black men, brandished concealed firearms. Hue erupted in shouts of “They got guns!”
But none of the club staff or security working that night could remember any of it. Hue owner Bennett Montoya didn’t find any evidence of the brawling and gun waving on security footage. An Entertainment Commission inspector from City Hall concluded that the incidents, which police said warranted stiff penalties, didn't happen. And then the police witness’ recollection fell apart under oath, with a judge striking his testimony from the record.
The state ABC largely agreed that the club was unfairly targeted:
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Yet a July 2018 ABC Appeals Board decision [PDF] supports Montoya’s view that police have unfairly targeted Hue, laying all of the problems of a bacchanalian block on the doorstep of one of the city’s few remaining hip-hop clubs. Evidence presented at the hearing, the board wrote, established that Hue was “singled out for unique surveillance and enforcement” and blamed for “more than its fair share” of incidents on the block, and that the treatment resulted from “the desire of [former Central Station Captain David Lazar] and the SFPD to reduce African-American patronage of [Hue] by eliminating hip-hop music.”
That decision, which is being appealed, comes after the appeals board dismissed more than 90 percent of 52 total police reports of violence and crime at Hue, deeming them insubstantial as evidence. But it’s of little relief to Montoya, whose entertainment hours were limited last June to midnight, instead of 2am, by the Entertainment Commission. Montoya objects to the commission continuing to act on police reports judged unreliable and of “discriminatory design” in the ABC case, and his suit seeks to recover the hundreds of thousands he’s spent defending his business.
The cop in charge seems pretty openly racist, so naturally he's been promoted to head of community engagement
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Montoya said Hue has been singled out because the club doesn't conform to the tempered vision of Broadway shared by local business interests as well as the police. He recalled how Central Station captain Lazar repeatedly told him that Hue attracts “the wrong crowd—a crowd we don’t want,” a comment corroborated in the ABC hearing by former CBD head Benjamin Horne. (Lazar, who’s since been promoted to commander of the department’s Community Engagement Division, didn’t respond to an interview request.)
BONUS POKER REFERENCE
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“At this point I’m all in,” Montoya said, likening the showdown to poker. “I can’t fold.”