Joseph Shapiro stands near where he was attacked in October 2022 in San Francisco. Shapiro was arriving at his work when he was hit over the head by a man with a broomstick. Police told him he was required to make a citizen’s arrest because the crime was a misdemeanor.
Joseph Shapiro heard the screaming first.
But, as the then 68-year-old law firm administrator stepped out of a cab in front of his downtown San Francisco office one morning last October, he didn’t think much about it. He’d recently moved from Pennsylvania to a neighborhood not far from the Tenderloin, where such sounds were commonplace enough that he barely registered them anymore.
Then came the hard crack of something hitting his head — and the sudden, sharp sensation of pain in his skull and shoulder.
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“I was so stunned,” Shapiro told me recently. “It took me a few seconds to understand what had happened.”
Shapiro didn’t initially connect the pain in his head to the screaming he’d heard moments earlier. But then he “turned around and saw this guy wielding a big stick and running to the side of the building,” and realized he had just been assaulted.
Dazed, Shapiro grabbed his phone and called 911. Police arrived on the scene about six minutes later — during which time Shapiro observed the aggressor continuing to scream and threaten people with a broomstick, according to a call transcript I obtained from the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management.
“How is clobbering somebody over the head with a large wooden stick a misdemeanor? It’s not, under anybody’s definition,” Joseph Shapiro says of being assaulted.
To Shapiro’s astonishment, however, police told him he had to sign a citizen’s arrest form for the alleged offender, identified as 45-year-old Billy Jiles Holdman III of San Francisco, to be taken into custody.
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“Why are you asking me to arrest him?” Shapiro remembers asking the police. “This just makes absolutely no sense.”
California’s citizen’s arrest process — a little-understood procedure that’s been in place since 1872 — has significant implications for how law enforcement handles lower-level crime.
Under the state penal code, without a warrant, law enforcement officers can’t arrest someone for most misdemeanor crimes unless the offense happens in their presence — or unless a witness signs a citizen’s arrest form.
For example, if a store clerk sees an individual stealing $200 worth of merchandise — theft less than $950 is a misdemeanor under California law — and a police officer isn’t present, the clerk would need to sign a citizen’s arrest form for law enforcement to take the suspect into custody.
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For felonies and other serious offenses, police without a warrant don’t need to witness the crime to arrest someone — they just need probable cause.
The reasons for this stretch back to the founding of the United States, Andrea Roth, a criminal justice law professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, told me: “We didn’t have these professional police forces at the time the Constitution was written, so we did really rely a lot more on citizens for certain types of law enforcement.”
The Fourth Amendment also established warrants as a prerequisite for most arrests. One “historical exception” is a felony committed in the presence of a law enforcement officer, Roth said. “If it’s just a misdemeanor, there’s less of a justification for deviating from the traditional warrant requirement to get an arrest” if an officer doesn’t directly witness the crime.
This makes sense: The Founding Fathers, wanting to protect against the government intrusion they experienced under colonial British troops, sought to ensure people couldn’t be arrested and held against their will for no reason or simply because someone accused them of committing a minor crime.
But the assault against Shapiro wasn’t a minor crime — which raises the question of why he had to sign a citizen’s arrest form in the first place.
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The 911 call transcript shows that operators categorized it as an aggravated assault or assault with a deadly weapon and flagged it as a top priority for police.
Yet police appear to have originally handled the attack as a misdemeanor. According to police spokesperson Kathryn Winters, the investigating officer “spent a not insignificant amount of time explaining the citizen’s arrest process to the victim.”
Shapiro was dumbfounded.
“How is clobbering somebody over the head with a large wooden stick a misdemeanor?” Shapiro asked me. “It’s not, under anybody’s definition.”
Under the California penal code, aggravated assault and assault with a deadly weapon can be charged as either a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on various factors. According to the police report, Shapiro didn’t have any visible injuries and refused multiple offers of medical treatment.
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But Shapiro was 68, and the crime could qualify as elder abuse. (Shapiro later took himself to the emergency room and was diagnosed with a potential concussion, according to medical records I reviewed.)
And according to the police report, another witness saw Holdman screaming and chasing a different “unknown victim” that morning before striking the hood of a nearby truck with the broomstick “in an angry manner,” creating a 2-foot-long dent that the owner estimated would cost about $1,500 to repair.
Furthermore, when police officers ran a warrant check on Holdman, they discovered he had two outstanding felony and misdemeanor warrants in San Mateo County, their report shows.
Ultimately, San Francisco police booked Holdman on several felony charges — which needed to be approved by a supervising officer — including aggravated assault.
But the only charge to which Holdman ultimately pled guilty was misdemeanor vandalism.
“He dented the car. That was more important than denting my head,” Shapiro said.
In the months after the attack, Shapiro waited for District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ office to call him about appearing in court to testify against Holdman. Finally, Shapiro said, he called the office himself — and learned that the case was over and the most serious charges had been dropped.
“I was pretty livid at that point,” Shapiro told me.
Shapiro said the office told him that prosecutors had made several unsuccessful attempts to reach him. But, Shapiro said, he never received a voicemail.
“It would have taken them five minutes to find out how to get in touch with me,” Shapiro said. “But they couldn’t be bothered.”
In a statement, the District Attorney’s Office said, “When we are unable to get in touch with victims or witnesses, we proceed in good faith, and work to advance justice in accordance with professional and ethical guidelines.” The office added, “We only bring forth charges that we can prove.”
For Shapiro, the experience solidified “everything I’ve been hearing about street crime in this city — that it’s not being dealt with.”
“I thought when they replaced the DA ... part of this was about finding somebody who was going to pay more attention to street crime,” Shapiro said. “But this happened under the new one, so …”
More than a year after his attack, Shapiro is still dealing with its consequences.
There’s “no permanent damage,” he told me, “other than to my emotional health.”
Reach Emily Hoeven: emily.hoeven@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @emily_hoeven
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