The dark side of police reform: gay rights, black neighborhoods, and how reformers paved the way for Eric Garner.

AuthorMayeux, Sara
Position"The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1990-1972" - Book review

The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1990-1972, by Christopher Lowen Agee, University of Chicago Press, 296 pages, $45

To patronize a gay bar in 1950s San Francisco, first you had to find it. As one gay rights activist remembers, "There were no signs....You would walk by a Gay bar 50 times and not know it was a Gay bar." Once inside, you had to remain wary. That gentleman smiling at you might be a flirt, but he might be an undercover cop. Leaving the bar presented its own risks. If you happened to tangle with the neighborhood patrolman, he might jail you for the night on drunkenness charges and send your name to the newspaper. The next morning, writes historian Christopher Lowen Agee in his book The Streets of San Francisco, "arrested bar-goers often went home to find themselves in the press and out of a job."

If you owned a gay bar in 1950s San Francisco, there were ways of protecting your patrons from harassment, thereby maintaining a clientele, but it would cost you. An old time bartender tells Agee about the lieutenant who came in one morning and explained that he needed $500 a month for--supposedly--the Police Athletic League: "The captain'll be by to collect it next Tuesday at 7:30." That was on top of the captain's monthly expectation of dinner and a prostitute.

In the 1958 film Vertigo, detective Scottie Ferguson visits a college classmate who worries that "San Francisco's changed. The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast." Presumably he was not referring to gay bars, but it was true that San Francisco was changing. Among the city's working-class Irish and Italian families and colorful cadres of artists and poets now lived growing numbers of white-collar professionals and "clean government" crusaders. In the late 1950s, a group of gay bar owners made the shrewd calculation that San Francisco's up-and-coming leaders cared about corruption more than they worried about homosexuality, and they confronted the police chief, who quickly recognized the public relations value of a high-profile crackdown on graft. The so-called "gayola" scandals culminated in i960 with the month-long criminal trial of two sergeants and two patrolmen accused of demanding payoffs.

Jurors acquitted all four officers, but the fact of the trial itself sent a strong message. Now, in the aftermath of police raids, San Francisco's gay community could count on support from liberal clergy members and attorneys who volunteered their services; from judges, who increasingly were vocally skeptical of anti-gay prosecutions; and from the ascendant San Francisco Chronicle, whose popular columnists lampooned the police as stilted rubes out of step with their lovably libertine city. In response to mounting criticism and narrowing legal options, the San Francisco police chief ended organized raids on...

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