Caught in the Cross-Fire: American Police and Social Conflicts

Origins of the Chicago Police Department

The origins of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), founded in 1855, are not much different than New York’s. Like Gotham, nineteenth-century Chicago “roiled with political and economic conflict,” particularly over alcohol regulation and labor agitation (Mitrani, p. 5). Mitrani’s excellent study provides the background to the development of the force over the next half century and the establishment of its legitimacy in the 1880s. He argues that a terrible act of violence—the notorious 1886 Haymarket bombing incident—played a major role in the acceptance of the department. The bombing, which killed seven police officers and wounded sixty, gave the CPD “new status as the successful defenders of order against anarchy” (p. 199). In short, the Chicago police story is a tale of urban disorder produced by intense social and political antagonisms, followed by the creation and solidification of a force designed to quell that disorder.

In 1850, Chicago had a population of less than 30,000 and a law enforcement apparatus of nine elected constables and night watchmen who worked part-time for the municipal court for meager salaries. By 1860, with a population of 112,000, the city’s constable/night watch force had become hopelessly inadequate. The so-called “Lager Beer Riot” of 1855 was the proximate cause of the founding of a true police department. In 1855, an anti-alcohol mayor, Levi Boone, hired eighty special officers and raised liquor licensing fees from $50 to $300. Ten German saloonkeepers refused to pay the fee and were arrested; nine others were locked up for serving drinks on Sunday, in violation of an old, but hitherto rarely enforced ordinance. When angry German immigrants gathered in protest, Boone deputized 150 special police, declared martial law, and summoned the state militia. They met the now-riotous demonstrators with overwhelming force: at least one rioter was killed, a policeman lost an arm, and sixty protesters were arrested. The Lager Beer Riot proved to be a watershed in the history of Chicago, the “founding moment for the Chicago Police Department” (p. 15).

The beer riot convinced Chicago’s City Council to adopt sweeping law enforcement reforms. The night watch was abolished and a new round-the-clock force, organized by military rank, was created. The new police department was given uniforms, and the city was divided into three police districts. In addition, as a sop to the protestors, the Council reduced the liquor license fee to $100, and most of the rioters were released without charges.

Crime and Corruption

Mitrani contends that the CPD was created for three reasons: to break strikes by the expanding unskilled labor force, angry over low wages and grueling work conditions; to protect private property from damage in riots and protests; and to “extend the power of the municipal government into the apparently lawless and disorderly immigrant neighborhoods” (p. 24). But what about violent crime? One of the factors in the creation of the New York police was the rise in serious crime, especially robbery, assault, and murder. Was this also a factor in the creation of the CPD? Extant scholarship suggests that Chicago’s homicide rates—a good indicator of all violent crime—were low in the nineteenth century. For instance, Jeffrey Adler reports rates of 3.2 to 5.2 per 100,000 for Chicago, 1875 to 1895, figures comparable with those of New York in the same time period. ² Mitrani states that there were fourteen arrests for murder between March 1865 and March 1866. With a population of approximately 250,000, this yields an arrest rate of 5.6 per 100,000. While this is fairly high for a nineteenth-century city, the actual murder rate, as opposed to the murder arrest rate, may have been even higher. For the 1850s, the decade of the CPD’s creation, while Mitrani provides some arrest data, the exact time frame is unclear, and he fails to calculate rates. A fuller discussion of crime in 1850s Chicago would have been helpful as it would indicate whether or not serious crime was a major influence on the formation of the city’s police department.

Mitrani does provide figures on public order arrests, that is, for public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and prostitution. Such offenses accounted for roughly 60 percent of all arrests. A majority or plurality of the arrestees were Irish and poor. This supports his claim that the police were formed, in part, to control immigrant neighborhoods. However, it is difficult to disentangle the regulation of immigrants from the regulation of vice since the poor immigrant communities also were the locus of the behaviors that the middle and upper classes found so offensive.

This brings us to Mitrani’s second shortcoming: the failure to give sufficient coverage to police corruption, especially as related to anti-vice policies such as the regulation of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution. The police department was caught between the moralists, who took a hard line against vice, and the libertarians, who thought the municipal government had no business regulating the private lives of citizens. The Chicago compromise was to legislate against vice and drive the proscribed activities into certain areas in the city such as the notorious Levee. There, in exchange for payoffs, the police simply ignored the laws against gambling casinos, drinking establishments, and bordellos. Caught in the middle of social conflict, the police found a way for individual officers to profit while the badge itself was tarnished. In To Serve and Collect, Richard Lindberg writes,

In the fashionable residential and commercial districts, the police were expected to close down the gambling dens and clear the boulevards of street walkers. But in the “tenderloin” districts, vice was allowed to exist in an environment that fostered police graft. . . . Police inspectors and district captains became rich and powerful in their respective neighborhoods because of the decentralized nature of Chicago politics, which permitted vice to flourish under the supervision of the local ward healer. . . . The constant struggle between reform and corruption and [between] reform and the emerging urban political “machine” characterized the first 100 years of Chicago police history. ³

Mitrani might have given more attention to the role of corruption in the history of Chicago’s police. It provided some of the police brass with an illegal windfall, but, more significantly, it undercut the legitimacy of the force. Ultimately, corruption was a major driver in the police professionalization movement that fundamentally changed law enforcement in the twentieth century.

Labor Violence

Despite these lapses, The Rise of the Chicago Police Department is an important addition to scholarship because of its discussion of the role of labor violence in the development of the policing. We turn now to that issue. After the Civil War, Chicago became a manufacturing and distribution center in the United States. Thousands were employed in meatpacking, iron production, the manufacture of railroad cars and agricultural implements, and the operation of rail lines for which the Windy City became a national hub. The flood of unskilled workmen kept wages low and working conditions deplorable. It was not long before workers organized to demand better pay and shorter workdays. As they became more militant in the face of owner resistance to their demands, strikes, demonstrations, and other threats to property and order likewise increased, and a beefed-up public force became more and more essential. A key point for Mitrani—perhaps the key point—is that “the business elite that controlled Chicago politics sought to use the police to contain the labor movement” (p. 60).

Mitrani discusses several major labor conflicts and other significant Chicago events, each of which had a particular impact on the city’s police department. First was the eight-hour workday movement, which prompted demonstrations in cities across the country on May 1, 1867. When workers in Chicago went on strike, the employers, for the first time, enlisted the police in suppressing the walkout. It took three days, but by May 3, the CPD gained control, breaking up crowds and arresting speakers. After the strike, the police force expanded by 44 percent, increasing from 173 to 250 men. The pattern of using the police to suppress labor activity was established.

The next major event was the Great Chicago Fire of October 8, 1871. The city’s population had grown to 300,000, about one-third of which was left homeless by the blaze. The great criminal justice concern was that the masses of poor and dislocated would loot the burned buildings, which numbered an estimated 18,000. Hundreds of special police were appointed, and the Army was called in. By the end of the month, however, fears of widespread looting abated. A year later, power over the department passed from the state, which had controlled the board of police commissioners, to the mayor and the city council. Thus was the local control model of policing established in Chicago.

In 1873, a financial panic set off a worldwide depression that threw thousands out of work in Chicago and depleted the city’s revenues. Behind the scenes, the business elite formed organizations such as the Citizens’ Association and the Commercial Club to plan for the inevitable violence. The Citizens’ Association, which included such corporate notables as Philip Armour, Cyrus McCormick, William Deering, and George Pullman, bought arms for the CPD and created a private militia to work with police in confronting an increasingly agitated population.

By 1877, the situation in Chicago reached a boiling point. With around 30,000 unemployed, others forced to endure pay cuts, and thousands pouring into the city looking for work, the socialist Workingmen’s Party declared a rail strike. The action quickly spread to other industries. The mayor recruited 322 volunteers to man police beats as the CPD broke up the rallies and confronted the rioters. On July 25, officers fired on a mob of 3,000 rioters, who threw stones and may have fired back. Seven were killed. The next day, when the protestors reassembled, the police killed and clubbed even more. Although the state militia was called in for backup, the CPD effectively, though viciously, suppressed the unrest. Henceforth, the police had the full support of the business elite while the rest of the population viewed them with scorn.

In 1879, Carter Harrison was elected mayor by a multiethnic coalition. His tenure proved decisive for the CPD. To gain favor with the working classes, Harrison kept the police out of strikes. Companies had to hire Pinkertons, who were expensive and not terribly effective. Harrison also placed new emphasis on the service role of the department: rescuing the mentally disturbed, the destitute, lost children, drowning victims, and “wayward girls.” He was also fortunate enough to have presided over some significant technological developments that had a major impact on everyday police work.

In 1880, the first police telegraph boxes were introduced. This enabled patrolmen to communicate immediately with the stationhouse, without racing to it or relying on messengers. Within the next few years, hundreds of boxes were installed on street corners throughout the city, though only police could use them. (Actually, Mitrani points out that more than 400 call boxes were installed in the homes of affluent private citizens—for a fee, of course.) The call boxes became a model for police nationwide.

Police response to service calls was also greatly improved when stationhouses were equipped with two-horse police wagons. The CPD even hired a doctor to train patrolmen in first aid. In 1883 alone, CPD wagons, responding to calls for assistance, transported 1,058 people to a hospital, 827 to homes, and 328 to a police station. Harrison made a point of publicizing the service activities of the CPD while strengthening the department in various ways. In 1884, he enlarged the force by 50 percent to 924, and accelerated the hiring of immigrants. The proportion of Irish policemen increased dramatically, while the percentage of Irish arrestees declined from more than 49 percent in 1865 to slightly more than 10 percent in 1886. Harrison raised hiring standards and installed professional and experienced police leaders. He proposed seniority pay to reduce turnover, kept a merit roll, and awarded medals to encourage excellence.

Despite the department makeover, trouble brewed on the labor front as union leaders once again grew more militant. Violent anarchists posed the biggest threat, and, ultimately, gave the CPD an enemy that turned the police into heroes. According to Mitrani, the Haymarket bombing of May 4, 1886 changed the image of the CPD from corrupt drunks to a bulwark against anarchy.

Details of the incident have been presented many times, and Mitrani summarizes them effectively from the standpoint of their impact on the Chicago police. The key events are as follows. On the evening of May 4, an estimated three thousand protesters gathered at Haymarket Square. Mayor Harrison and a large group of police attended. After sunset, the chill thinned the crowd to about 500. At 10:20 p.m., a police column moved toward the crowd and ordered them to disperse. As the speaker climbed down, a bomb exploded. Accounts differ over whether demonstrators fired guns, but the police shot into the crowd, killing five, wounding forty-five. The bomb blast killed one policeman instantly; six others died in the next few days; sixty police were wounded.

After Haymarket, Chicago police turned on the anarchists, arresting them, breaking up their meetings, seizing their property, infiltrating their organizations, and shutting down their newspapers. Around two hundred were arrested, and four leaders were executed the following November. Haymarket became a focus of media attention all over the country, and, most important, the CPD and its leaders were seen as heroes. Donations poured in to the wounded officers and the families of those who died. The Chicago Tribune led a fund drive to erect a statue in Haymarket Square to commemorate the fallen police. Within Chicago, wrote Mitrani, “the police had achieved new status as the successful defenders of order against anarchy” (p. 199). By the 1890s, police departments in the United States were stronger, more disciplined, and, most important, more legitimate in the eyes of the public than ever before.

Professionalizing the Police

At the turn of the twentieth century, American police faced new pressures. Progressive reformers sought to professionalize policing while old-style urban politicians wanted to continue using the police to ensure their power and line their pockets. Police were controlled by and owed their jobs to ward politicians. Wards often coincided with police precincts, and the precinct commanders were selected by, and could be dismissed by, the ward leader. The commanders in turn appointed the patrolmen, though civil service laws adopted in the last decades of the nineteenth century made it harder to fire them. This highly decentralized system was responsive to local concerns, yet thoroughly corrupt. Progressives pressed for legislation to outlaw drinking, gambling, and prostitution. Such laws were passed, but enforcement was uneven at best. Demand for these activities was great and the concomitant payoffs to politicians and police created a system of rampant corruption.

To break the control of the ward healers, progressives demanded citywide elections. Where commissions ran police departments, they were replaced by one-person chiefs accountable to mayors. By the first half of the twentieth century, centralized police bureaucracies controlled by professional police chiefs became the administrative model for police departments throughout the United States.

In addition to these administrative changes, the duties of police were refocused. Nineteenth century police had a variety of responsibilities, from inspecting boilers, to cleaning streets to providing aid to the homeless and destitute. But progressives believed that police ought to be enforcing the law and fighting crime, not doling out charity, and this became the new mantra of police work. Encapsulated by the word “professionalism,” police were now expected to be trained for a specific mission, primarily crime fighting, and police departments were to be managed by experts without political interference. ⁴

Three factors were instrumental in the success of the movement to professionalize law enforcement. First, the dramatic rise in crime in the first three decades of the twentieth century put new emphasis on crimes of violence. As I show in my book, The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America, there was a major increase in U.S. homicides between 1910 and 1936, with rates averaging 8.89 per 100,000, and exceeding 9.5 per 100,000 for four years. ⁵ These rates were roughly twice those of the 1890s. Alarm over violent crime, which peaked in the early 1930s, was widespread, and became the focus of enormous media attention. J. Edgar Hoover capitalized on these concerns and fashioned the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into a highly professional anti-crime force. Hoover’s success in hunting down violent criminals burnished the reputation of the FBI, while simultaneously enshrining crime control as the primary function of local police departments.

Second, changes in science and technology in the 1930s were once again transforming police work, as call boxes had in the nineteenth century. Borrowing from European advances in “criminalistics”—the application of science to police work—big city police chiefs and Hoover set up a nationwide system of fingerprint identification and established crime detection laboratories. This boosted the image of police as professionals, not just baton-wielding brutes. Automobile and radio technology was even more significant. In 1929, Detroit became the first city to adopt a police car with radio communication capacity. During the 1930s, the patrol car began replacing foot patrol altogether in the United States, enabling police to cover a much greater area with fewer men and respond more rapidly to calls. ⁶

Third was the advent of law enforcement leadership unreservedly committed to professionalism. These new chiefs, most prominent among them Orlando W. Wilson and William H. Parker, rose through the ranks during the era when the crime fighter image and scientific policing were being established. Wilson went on to reform the CPD (1960-1967), and Parker the Los Angeles Police Department (1950-1966), in conformity with the latest in professional policing principles.

By the end of World War II, what David Johnson called “the gospel of professionalism” had triumphed. ⁷ Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, police departments were fashioned into bureaucracies, much like other departments of city government. Consistent with the expertise paradigm, they were divided into specialized bureaus for traffic, vice, juveniles, and the like, bureaus headed by assistant commissioners who formed part of a rigid chain of command leading up to a commissioner or chief appointed by the mayor. Decentralized policing run by local politicians was a thing of the past. Soon, however, the centralized police would face challenges in local neighborhoods, especially neighborhoods populated by African Americans and other minorities, in which one-size policing did not fit all. These new challenges would, once again, lead to a rethinking of the role of the police.

Postwar Policing in San Francisco

These latter developments are deftly sketched in Christopher Agee’s account of policing in San Francisco from the 1950s to the early 1970s, which we now review. A bustling shipbuilding town during the war, the 1950 San Francisco population was 775,000, 90 percent of which was white. In subsequent decades, the population actually declined by 70,000, while the minority proportions increased. This was due to the combination of white out-migration and black in-migration typical of U.S. cities in the 1950s and 1960s. Consequently, the black proportion of the city increased from 5.6 percent in 1950 to 13.4 percent in 1970. San Francisco’s traditional Asian population, mainly Chinese, rose to rough parity with the black population, that is, 13.3 percent in 1970. Hispanics in 1970 totaled an estimated 11.6 percent, giving the city a 38 percent minority population. ⁸ Moreover, San Francisco’s minorities were not all defined by race or ethnicity. There were significant “lifestyle minorities”—beats, hippies, and homosexual activists—who, Agee shows, played an important part in the development of the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).

The last several chapters of Agee’s work focus on the reactions of the police to the rise in violent crime and disorder among the city’s African American population. This occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But before the race/crime/disorder problem took center stage, though overlapping it as well, the SFPD had two different issues to resolve, both involving major challenges to prevailing values and lifestyles, namely, the beatnik/hippie challenge and the homosexual rights question. All three issues placed the police in the maelstrom of movements and countermovements for social change. As before in American history, the police were caught up in controversies that they did not create and could not resolve.

Old-style corrupt policing continued in San Francisco right through the early 1950s. Reform, however, was on its way. New leadership dedicated to police professionalism came to town in 1956 with the election of George Christopher as mayor. Agee describes Christopher as one of a new breed of “managerial growth mayors committed to clean-government reforms and downtown redevelopment” (p. 35). Christopher named Frank Ahern as police chief, but when Ahern died suddenly in 1958, his deputy, Thomas Cahill, assumed the leadership. A striking and magnetic figure, Cahill became the longest-tenured chief in SFPD history. Not only was he honest, he was committed to the professionalism paradigm.

Cahill adopted “preventive policing”—efforts to control high-crime areas without waiting for calls to the police. Most notably, he implemented “Operation S,” which relied on crime statistics to identify high-crime areas, then flooded these locations with fifty cops twice weekly. Operation S was a forerunner of “hot spot policing,” well known to police experts today and widely adopted in the 1990s.

Operation S went hand-in-hand with the rediscovery of police discretion, touted at the time as a more realistic description of police work as well as a valuable tool in the law enforcement arsenal. In its essence, police were not expected to arrest all law violators with whom they came in contact (not that they ever did). Instead, they would use their authority, the unspoken threat of arrest, to control urban street problems, such as low-level public order offenses. In the late James Q. Wilson’s well-known analysis of policing, officers would stress “order maintenance” over law enforcement. ⁹

Operation S focused initially on the Fillmore District, which was, in the 1950s, predominantly black. There, police discretion meant harassment of African Americans since officers were left free to use their judgment as to when and how to maintain order. It was not until the late 1960s, however, that the issue of aggressive policing in minority communities became explosive.

Police and the Culture Wars

Agee’s second chapter is devoted to police run-ins with beats, or as San Francisco columnist Herb Caen dubbed them, “beatniks,” located predominantly in the North Beach section of the city. The beats were a young counterculture minority in the 1950s and early 1960s, forerunners of the hippies of the late 1960s, and known for their rejection “of the racial, sexual, and gender mores of mainstream culture” (p. 41). ¹⁰ Their goal was nothing less than a spiritual and cultural revolution—at a time when to be out of step in America was to be suspected of insufficient patriotism or even Communist tendencies. Indeed, by July 1960, FBI director Hoover was telling the Republican National Convention that the “three menaces” to America were “Communists, Beatniks and eggheads.” According to Alan Bisbort,

To those young people who read the novels and poems of beat writers, viewed the paintings, sculptures, murals, and collages of beat artists, gasped and gaped at beat theater and dance troupes, and dug the beat musical canon of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and John Coltrane, these figures were the very opposite of “menaces.” Indeed, for many they were saviors, providing a parallel and vastly more appealing culture and a way out of the Cold War conformity and consumerism. ¹¹

The beats were, essentially, engaged in a culture war with the conventional mainstream. Although Agee does not present the issue this way, I see the police as hostages of that culture conflict. San Francisco and its substantial and influential Catholic population had opposed the beats’ “cultural and sexual transgressions” and urged the SFPD to suppress them (p. 113). Agee suggests that since the police ranks were overwhelmingly Catholic, departmental reliance on discretion produced anti-beat policing without a formal policy emanating from the top. As a result, patrolmen harassed beats in their North Beach neighborhood, especially if they were black or female. (There was, Agee explains, particular opposition to interracial socializing.) Agee relates how one patrol officer in particular, William Bigarani, led a one-man crusade against them.

Agee offers no evidence of any massive crackdown on beats or of widespread arrests, so the clash between police and beats remained low-key. The conflict did, however, produce a noteworthy development in the law. In 1961, the state legislature narrowed California’s vagrancy statutes, a tool of discretionary—and discriminatory—policing for decades. Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court held such statutes unconstitutional. ¹²

Agee sees the beats versus police issue as an episode in the evolution of policing in San Francisco toward a more tolerant and pluralistic model in coalition with the city’s liberals. This is a plausible analysis so long as it is understood that the police had little choice. They did not run the city, and they were not independent players. If the mayor and other key municipal leaders were liberal, the police had to find ways to work with them.

By 1960, so many tourists came to North Beach to see the “beatniks” that property values began to spike, and the beats were priced out of their own community. It was emblematic of the end of police-beat conflict that in August 1960, Patrolman Bigarani, the anti-beat crusader, was transferred to the Mission District.

Agee’s next two chapters focus on the SFPD’s relations with the city’s homosexual population, the second culture clash. This conflict had two focal points: gay bars and pornographic publications and performances. The SFPD was not the only major player here. The bars, for instance, fell under the state alcohol and beverage control (ABC) laws, and special state agents, sometimes working with city police, monitored the taverns. Similarly, obscene materials fell within the purview of the Customs Collector for the Port of San Francisco, and it was the chief customs collector who spearheaded 1950s drives against works with homosexual themes.

The SFPD was ambivalent about suppressing homosexuals. In line with the homophobic attitudes of the era, patrolmen were uncomfortable with anti-gay details. However, they did not mind shaking down gay bars, which were vulnerable to threats to their licenses. ABC law made it a misdemeanor for a licensed restaurant or bar to be used as a “disorderly house” or place “to which people resort for purposes which are injurious to public morals.” The California Supreme Court, in 1951, held that a bar cannot be considered a “disorderly house” simply because it is a hangout for homosexuals. ¹³ Nevertheless, the gay bar raids continued—as did the payoffs. Finally, in the early 1960s, Mayor Christopher clamped down on police corruption, and a 1960 sting operation netted several officers. A month-long “gayola” trial ensued, and although the officers were acquitted, “large-scale payoff networks ceased operation in the mid-1960s” (p. 97).

The obscenity clashes pitted the city’s beats, gays, and liberals against conservative Catholics. The police were once again caught in the middle. Pressed to do more by the conservatives, there were arrests and occasionally trials involving sexually explicit writing and performances, graphic depictions of sex, and topless bars. But by the late 1960s, the national trend was clearly against censorship. The nation’s values were changing, especially on sexual matters. San Francisco’s new mayor, Joseph Alioto, elected in November 1967, worked out a compromise. Artistic works portraying sexual activity were okay; low-level smut was not. Agee skillfully provides the details of these developments within San Francisco, but he misses the bigger picture: the values change in the United States generally, which surely impinged on the relaxation of obscenity enforcement in the city.

Policing African Americans

The next section of Agee’s book, well over half the narrative, is devoted to the SFPD’s relations with the city’s black community. This is the most intriguing part of the work because it resonates with current police issues.

The late 1960s was a tumultuous period in the United States. There were hundreds of riots in black communities across the nation, campus and street protests against the Vietnam War, bombings, jailbreaks, and violence incited by the Weather Underground, and dramatic escalations in violent crime. An astonishing 81 percent of Americans surveyed in 1968 thought that law and order had broken down altogether.

San Francisco came out of this period of turmoil relatively unscathed. There was only one riot, in September 1966, in the Hunters Point section of the city, 97 percent black at the time. The disturbance resulted in 359 arrests (mainly curfew violations) and fifty-one injuries, but no deaths and under $100,000 in property damage. The proximate cause was the shooting death of a black unarmed teen by a white police officer after the youth ran off, ignoring commands to halt. The boy, fearing that the police would find out that he and two friends had cut out of school, stolen a car, and driven it around town, panicked at the sight of a patrol car and fled. The ensuing rioting lasted two days. Police established a perimeter to contain, but not stop, the violence.

Agee insists that the underlying cause of the disturbances was the “unjust discretionary policing typical in low-income neighborhoods of color,” with its petty arrests, humiliations, and excessive force (p. 145). But he also recognizes the distress of African Americans over the failure of law enforcement to stem the tide of rising violent crime in their neighborhoods. In Agee’s words, there was an “internal struggle among black San Franciscans as they attempted to balance their interest in compensating for police neglect with their desire to battle disproportionate police violence” (p. 146).

Police neglect was a problem because African American crime victimization was outsized. As Agee acknowledges, San Francisco “suffered stomach-wrenching spikes” in murder and robbery in 1968 and 1969, and he attributed the surge in murders to “younger black men living in Hunters Point” (pp. 175-76). ¹⁴ According to SFPD records, in 1969, when blacks were 13.4 percent of the city, they were arrested for 61 percent of the nonvehicular homicides, 59 percent of the robberies, and 54 percent of the aggravated assaults. ¹⁵ Given that crimes are usually committed within the offender’s neighborhood, and given the residential segregation of U.S. cities, including San Francisco, it is highly likely that these crimes victimized African Americans.

This brings the law enforcement dilemma into sharper focus. What is the best way to patrol a predominantly black neighborhood that is also a high-crime neighborhood? Aggressive policing seems to generate abuses and resentments; indifferent policing leaves a community vulnerable to predators. Agee describes the issue this way:

Across urban America, similar brews of police irritation, dread, and bigotry fed a schizophrenic style of law enforcement. In Hunters Point officers spent much of their time using their discretion to abdicate their responsibilities to Housing Authority police. . . . But on those occasions when Potrero Station police felt compelled to respond to disorder on the Hill, they unleashed disproportionate levels of force. . . . Rank-and-file police were notorious . . . for their dawdling responses to calls for help from within Hunters Point. Police often showed little concern about acts of violence on the Hill. (p. 152) ¹⁶

It also did not help matters that black citizen complaints of abuse and excessive force “ran up against dead ends in both the civil courts and the SFPD’s internal investigations” (p. 189), nor that “the SFPD distinguished itself among the nation’s metropolitan police forces by resisting demands for racial integration” (p. 195). In 1965, the department had fifty-five black officers out of a force of 1,726, or 3.2 percent. Six years later, African Americans were 5 percent of the force when they were 13.4 percent of the city. In contrast, in 1968, Mayor Alioto appointed Washington Garner, a black physician, police commissioner.

Strains between African Americans and law enforcement also were exacerbated by a newfound black militancy and violence aimed at police. The Black Panthers, founded in nearby Oakland in 1966, vitriolically condemned the police as an occupying army and violently confronted officers on numerous occasions. Attacks on police occurred around the nation, some by black, others by white, radicals. In Chicago, for instance, thirty officers were killed by firearms alone between 1966 and 1970.

San Francisco suffered a series of violent incidents:

These episodes frightened the police rank-and-file, who then became more militant in their own right. They formed organizations within the SFPD to oppose civilian review boards and other attempts to oversee the department, fearing that they would be staffed by activists unsympathetic to the police. They also pressed for improvements in their pay, benefits, and work conditions. Another outcome was that Mayor Alioto, who presented himself as a liberal, formed and augmented a tactical force of trained, tough officers armed with various crowd control tools, such as mace and tear gas. At the same time, the mayor’s African American police chief revivified a police-community relations unit that Alioto used for outreach to blacks. Thus did San Francisco launch in the 1960s what is nowadays called “community policing.”

Agee concludes with a repudiation of the claim that liberalism and tolerance for minorities are incompatible with vigorous law enforcement. While some cities, for example, Philadelphia, chose hard-line law-and-order leaders in the 1970s, San Francisco did not. And yet, Agee insists, the SFPD aggressively confronted the rise in violence. In his words, “The cosmopolitan liberal coalition’s growing tolerance for cultural, racial, and sexual pluralism did not lead it to reject hard-nosed law enforcement. Quite the opposite, . . . inclusiveness enabled tougher policing against violent crime” (p. 248). In one sense, this is quite correct. In a liberal city like San Francisco, the police also needed to be liberal. Indeed, they had little choice. Despite successful efforts in the twentieth century to insulate them from political interference, police departments are not by any means wholly independent actors. They must work with and accommodate the municipal leadership. Tolerance of beats, hippies, and gays was not incompatible with aggressive law enforcement. And, in San Francisco, both tolerance and aggressiveness were essential.

Since the 1970s

Much has happened in the world of policing since the 1970s, changes well beyond the scope of this essay. Among the most significant developments were

Despite successes, scandals and controversies dogged some of these developments, and many have been modified or abandoned. More important, however, none of them, singly or collectively, has resolved our most vexing contemporary law enforcement problem: the policing of low-income but high-crime African American communities. As the events since the 2014 Ferguson, Missouri, incident and the #BlackLivesMatter protests make clear, the police continue to face a predicament. They are expected to grapple with crime and disorder even where they are resented by the residents of the most crime-prone and disorderly communities. And they are expected to solve social problems that they are not trained or able to solve. As the thorough and meticulous crime histories reviewed here teach us, though the issues may have changed, American police have been in this uncomfortable position before.