A witness wrote to Mission Local describing a Sunday night party in Dolores Park that “was a lot messier” than we described in our earlier story. She said the police response time was delayed.

“They didn’t need all the officers on the Castro, they needed a couple around Dolores. This is my fourth Pride and usually everyone ends at Dolores on Sunday, but I’ve never seen it get that nuts.”

Police said that a 28-year-old man was stabbed just before 8 p.m. and was being treated for non-life threatening injuries. The SFPD did not have officers in the park at the time. “At the time we were focused on the Pride events” and other problems around the city, said SFPD spokesperson Officer Robert Rueca.

He added that the victim said he bumped into someone at the park and then realized when the suspect bumped him, he had been stabbed.

The eyewitness said it was around 7:45 p.m. when the girl got hit with the bottle. “She was try to avoid the whole ordeal, it just escalated quick because everyone was drunk and so people started heckling and getting rowdy,” the witness wrote. She added that she called 911 at “exactly 8:02 pm.”

Here is an account from an eyewitness. If you have video, please send it to info@missionlocal.com.

It was a group of juveniles escalating the entire scenario. There was not enough police presence around Dolores Park to keep the situation from escalating and the police didn’t arrive until around 30 – 45 minutes after the fight ended…(Note: Police arrived around 8:30 p.m.) I watched from my group in the middle of the park as the girls got hit with the bottle, everyone just kept getting rowdy and recording on their phones. A group of guys beside me was cheering on the whole ordeal and filming. Then the energy of everything shifted and there was some definite animosity in the air. It was all really disorienting and happened super fast. All of a sudden on the other side of the park opposite the bathrooms a guy got chased down and about four guys brought him down and started kicking him on the ground. They were really kicking him and beating him badly. I heard someone say there was a knife. Again, no one deescalated and a mob formed around the fight. Everyone recorded the incident…I watched him get curb stomped. It was really extreme. Like a bad episode of Black Mirror. No one did anything to stop it, everyone was just filming and watching. The only thing that seemed to stop the whole scenario was when a tall, wiry and really stoned gay guy named Cameron near my group began twerking and the whole mob of people ran at him and began to dance around him.

Cameron, the witness wrote, got nervous and said he was too high and didn’t really know what was happening “only that he felt like the only thing he could do about the energy was to dance.”

Sounds silly, but he probably saved someone’s life with a twerk! People started dancing, but there was still a lot of negativity in the air. People started dispersing and the dancing probably staved off anymore fights until the police surrounded the place. When I was leaving the place there was a man being treated in a fire truck and there was a woman talking to police who had his blood on her. I was standing next to the fire truck waiting for my Uber. A girl in my group said she heard the girl who had blood on her that her friend got stabbed. The overwhelming issue here was not just the trash everywhere (which was sad) but the lack of any sort of police presence around the park. There was no reason for any of the fighting. Had there been a friendly police presence around the park like there was around the parade the entire situation would have been avoided. The entire time the fight was occurring I kept thinking “this will be stopped any second by an officer we don’t realize is there.” There was so much alcohol and drug use, of course there was going to be a fight. By the time the police arrived we all were already dispersing from the area so of course no arrests were made. This group of guys totally jumped the kid and bolted the second the dancing started.

In a follow up e-mail, the witness added that after the beating incident,

It was starting to get dark and cold. I’d already given baby wipes to several people throwing up on the street corners. Everyone was just really drunk. There would have been way more fighting had the police not arrived when they did. Traffic was really congested from everything going on in the city so the response time was definitely after the fighting ended. The police arrived around 8:30 p.m. and completely surrounded the place with firetrucks and police motorcycles. I got worried for a moment that I had been overzealous with calling them, but when I saw some girl in her little raver outfit with someone else’s blood on her arms I was glad I made the call. A man was inside the firetruck was definitely being treated for injuries. But by the time police arrived the people in the fight had pretty much taken off. There needed to be a friendly police presence around Dolores making sure people were safe there as well, and it kind of felt like Dolores was the one place without security.

Here is David Hansen’s video of the scene: