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The Streets of San Francisco

October 1, 2014
Christopher Lowen Agee

Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972
Reviewed by Dennis Bianchi

The author of this book, Christopher Lowen Agee, is an assistant professor in the history department at the University of Colorado, Denver. This is his first book. Current officers of the San Francisco Police Department will likely find the book a bit startling and hard to believe. He paints a rather ugly picture of The City during the middle of the last century. It has been one of the most difficult books for me to read and review.

Although I didn’t join the San Francisco Police Department until March of 1970, I had lived in San Francisco from 1965 and had a first-person view of many of the events on which Mr. Agee reports. I was working at 3rd and 20th Streets when the race riots took place in the Potrero district in 1966. I lived across the street from San Francisco State University when the students rioted there in 1968. Perhaps it is a positive statement regarding the more recent changes and improvements that the current San Francisco Police Department has so little in common with what is found in the pages of Mr. Agee’s work.

The thesis Mr. Agee seems to be trying to prove is that policing and police officers were very influential in bringing about the liberal political environment of San Francisco. The premise is interesting, but I’m left with the feeling that he assigns too much influence to the police, though they most surely were involved in the process. Mr. Agee began his research into the San Francisco Police Department as a graduate student. His adviser suggested the subject of a scandal that the adviser had read about which took place in San Francisco called the “Gayola Scandal.” The author explains it was a scandal in which cops had been shaking down gay bars during the 1950s and 1960s.  In both the acknowledgment of the book, and in a separate and later interview, Mr. Agee admits that he found very little in the way of documentary evidence of much of what he has written about. He, therefore, relied heavily on oral histories, interviews of several people who were involved in the scandal, and others who claimed to have knowledge of the events during or after the events. He also extensively relied on newspaper reports of those so-called “Gayola” events and chapters on North Beach and the bohemian movement, commonly referred to as the Beat Generation, police censorship of writings, painting and sculpture and neglected attention of youth gangs.

I became critically wary of the author very early when I came across his reference to Chief Kevin Mullen’s book Chinatown Squad: Policing the Dragon: From the Gold Rush to the 21st Century. I recalled Mr. Mullen’s book quite well. I own a copy of the book, so I checked the reference to what Mr. Agee implied Mr. Mullen had meant. Mr. Agee concludes that “SFPD leaders further evinced their dim views toward Chinatown residents by discouraging dialogue between the Chinatown detail and Chinese Americans…Moreover, the department made it impossible for neighborhood residents to contact officers by phone…The SFPD expected Chinatown residents to stand and wait for the detail to pass by the intersection of Washington and Grant streets or to leave a message at Red’s Bar at the corner of Jackson Street and Beckett Alley. These old-world arrangements enhanced the squad’s cachet with the nation’s true crime magazines, but the Chinese Chamber of Commerce complained that merchants often could not locate police when robberies occurred.”

By contrast, Chief Mullen explains in his book that, during the 1950s, “Citizens seeking police help had been instructed to call in on the phone to a central communications center so that a marked radio car could be dispatched …But not in Chinatown. Whether it was the wish of the community – and there is much to support that notion – or institutional reluctance to change, the Squad’s patrol methods harked back to an earlier pre-radio, pre-automobile day, an anachronism which served to work to everyone’s satisfaction.” Chief Mullen not only mentioned Red’s in a positive way, he included a photo of the corner bar. After that discrepancy, I began checking as many of the notes as I could.

Another revelation occurred when I noticed that, of the many San Francisco Police Officers Mr. Agee interviewed, none were quoted as often as Richard Hongisto and John Mindermann, two men who left the Department early in their careers. Mr. Hongisto certainly remained an active political player in San Francisco, but was often at odds with the Police Department, even after being appointed Chief in 1992. His tenure lasted six weeks. Were these unbiased opinions of objective witnesses? In a communication exchange with the author I learned it was because these two men were very willing to discuss police discretionary powers.

Other officers were interviewed, some at length, who served the Department for their entire career: Jerry Crowley, Gale Wright, Elliot Blackstone, Sol Weiner and John Lehane, all plain-spoken career officers. Two of the most articulate officers quoted were Mike Hebel and Jerry D’Arcy, both full-career officers. All of those members’ quotes ring true, even if the individuals were at odds with the Department from time to time. I have interviewed Jerry Crowley myself and found him to be forthcoming, blunt and entertaining. He also never left the Department. He stayed through a lot of trials and tribulations. He still has a great sense of humor.

But the author has focused much attention to the idea of police discretion. In an interview he states, “Discretion is a political science term – tons of choice or power over what I do because I can’t be monitored at all times. This is the story of policing.”

It is the author’s contention that those powers are pivotal game changers. A quote from the book’s liner notes reads as follows: “It wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s, when new peoples and cultures poured into the city, that San Francisco produced a new liberal politics. [The author] focusing in particular on the crucial role the police played during this cultural and political shift … He partly attributes the creation and survival of cosmopolitan liberalism to the police’s new authority to use their discretion when interacting with African-American gang leaders, owners of gay and lesbian bars, Haight-Ashbury hippies, artists who create sexually explicit works, Chinese American entrepreneurs, and a host of other postwar San Franciscans ...Today, liberal cities across America ground themselves in similar understandings of democracy through an emphasis on both broad diversity and strong policing.”

In an interview that may be found on University of Colorado website, Dr. Agee states, “The general story of policing, the way historians talk about –“the police are working for city hall, and they come in and kick ass” – they’re sort of representatives of the state. But what I was finding was that these cops were coming into the bar and doing their own thing, which is discretion, they had lots of discretion. The stories that they told me were different than the stories historians had told. Ultimately, what I found was that the gay bar owners were exploiting the ‘discretion.’ ”

Perhaps it is because I wasn’t a member of the San Francisco Police Department during the 1950s and 1960s that I find the part of his sentence to be, “the police are working for city hall,” to be more important than Dr. Agee does. My experience has always been that police officers do have a lot of discretionary powers because it is near impossible to monitor their every action, coupled with the enormous number and variety of problems they are asked to solve. It is also true that there has always been a small number of officers who abuse that discretionary power, but city governments are the ultimate word as to what discretionary actions will be tolerated or promoted and which ones won’t.

In Chapter 6, titled, “If You Are Very Liberal toward Dissent, You can Be a Little Bit Tougher: Cosmopolitan Liberalism and the Use of Force,” the author discusses the changes made by Mayor Joseph Alioto. During Mayor Alioto’s first year-and-a-half in office, he had “…shored up the PCR (Police Community Relations) unit, introduced the tac (sic) squad, and used the two policing groups to help score simultaneous victories…” The Mayor had become a national celebrity and was invited to speak at many venues, including the United States Congress, where he used the words that formed the sub-title of this chapter. “ ‘It seems to me,’ Alioto told Congress, ‘that, if you are very liberal toward dissent, you can be a little bit tougher, even, in terms of law enforcement, because you have removed one of the frustrations.’  Similarly, Alioto insisted that, ‘when you have been very, very liberal’ in the disciplining of wayward officers, you ‘can afford to be a little tougher about law enforcement.’ As both of these formulations revealed, Alioto predicated his understanding of democracy and the use of force on the assumption that the mayor could maintain his authority of the rank and file.”

Of course, the era of Mayor Alioto is two decades past what the author described as machine-driven politics, an era he describes as an open and corrupt period of San Francisco. He describes the era of Mayor George Christopher and that of Mayor John Shelley as a turning away from those practices and the focus changed toward managerial growth proponents and the professionalization of the Police Department, along side traditional liberal values. I had not experienced a deep appreciation of that change of San Francisco’s politics and policing until reading this book.

I had a difficult time accepting the reliance upon interviews and newspaper articles. Several years ago I sat down with retired Chief Kevin Mullen to discuss a writing project I had in mind, and he gave me some advice that I have kept in mind ever since. Newspaper articles have always had the problem of being in competition with one another. Getting the story first was often more important than getting the story correct.  Secondly, the problem with interviews is what all police officers discover when interviewing witnesses: eyewitness testimony is not very reliable. I was reading an article in a magazine recently that used the best term I can think of to describe witness interviews: confabulation. It was defined by my electronic Merriam-Webster dictionary as, “to fill in gaps in memory by fabrication.” That is not to say that people necessarily lie, they just fill in what they can’t remember with a story they believe, absent any documentary proof of their statements, or they may fill in the missing memory with what they believe the interviewee wants to hear.

As a history of San Francisco during the 1950s and 1960s, this book is not just informative but colorful. But the descriptions and condemnations of many of the members of the San Francisco Police Department, including Chiefs Gaffey, Ahern and Cahill, will likely displease some readers. The author’s penultimate chapter, “City Hall Can Be Beaten,” brings the reader to the early 1970s, the last decade of the book. The purpose of this chapter seems to be to offer an explanation of how the Police Officers’ Association came to be controlled by a new group of leaders, known as the Blue Coats, who turned the Association away from the past fealty to management and toward an attention and focus on improved working conditions and wages. It also describes the clashes between the newly formed Officers for Justice and the Police Officers’ Association. The author describes the odd shift of loyalties that occurred when Mayor Alioto and Chief Scott attempted to not only close two police stations, Park and Potrero, but to reconstruct the Department from nine district stations to four headquarters. A coalition of sorts was formed between the Police Officers’ Association and many neighborhood organizations and associations that had been at odds with the rank and file officers in years past. Although the two stations were closed, the coalitions formed brought about a charter amendment that reopened the stations and mandated Board of Supervisor approval for any future closings. The Blue Coats and the officers who followed them had changed the playing field. City Hall could be challenged and officers’ voices were among those challenging and winning. Mr. Agee writes, amidst his several conclusions, “Thus, seemingly contradictory police policies – such as stop-and-frisk, police-community relations, and tactical police law enforcement – all coexisted in the cosmopolitan liberal police department. Nevertheless, cosmopolitan liberal policing maintained new and distinct principles: the rank and file lost their unquestioned, autonomous discretion over the city’s morals and the use of force, but achieved a political voice and regained legitimacy for discretion through cooperation.”

As I said at the opening of this review, this book was a slog to both read and review. I found myself re-reading sections, constantly checking citations and searching for related material. This is not a summer read for the beach. It is a culmination of years of work, which Professor Agee admits was a learning process for him as well. There was a vignette reported of a conversation between then Officer Gale Wright and his captain, following an arrest that must have made the author smile. “Wright remembered the captain remarking, “I see by your record…. You have two years [in] city college’ And I said, ‘yes, sir.’ And he asked, ‘Do you plan on going back to college?’ Wright answered affirmatively, and the captain responded, ‘Well we frown on that in the department.’ In other words,’ Wright concluded, ‘he wanted to be the only educated bastard around.’”  That incident was replayed a few years later when a lieutenant said the almost identical remark to me. Today’s San Francisco Police Department is filled with officers who have earned degrees from many fields. The discretionary choices made today by those officers are still controlled by powers beyond their decisions alone, but having a better-educated and professional department is certainly a positive direction.  If you have an interest in the development of the San Francisco Police Department this book is a very good source. You might find yourself, as I did, doing more research or recalling past incidents from a new perspective. You might question many of the remarks and conclusions, but you won’t think of the San Francisco Police Department in the same way.