The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1972 by Christopher Lowen Agee (review)

Today tourists visit Haight Ashbury and North Beach neighbourhoods where beat poets and hippies experimented with art, drugs, and bohemian lifestyles. Specific sites evoke nostalgia for past social scenes, but these same places also recall bitter confrontations between police and local residents. Many of those famous moments punctuate a romanticized historical narrative of the city that celebrates the forward march of tolerance and inclusiveness. Christopher Lowen Agee’s excellent The Streets of San Francisco disentangles the far more complex and contingent history of how city residents, police officers, and elected officials forged a “cosmopolitan liberal politics” through conflict, compromise, and institutional reform.

Agee primarily focuses on how the San Francisco Police Department (sfpd) shaped city politics and definitions of citizenship over the course of more than two decades. His analysis traces institutional changes in the sfpd while emphasizing demographic continuities; officers remained overwhelmingly white Catholics of Italian and Irish heritage. The book provides an insightful treatment of the origins and consequences of the individual patrolman’s use of discretionary power. Police prerogatives disproportionately affected marginalized beats, hippies, homosexuals, African Americans, and Chinese Americans in explicitly discriminatory ways. By the mid-fifties urban reformers and redevelopment advocates responded to mayor Elmer Robinson’s machine politics with calls to clean up the notoriously corrupt sfpd.

The election of George Christopher as mayor in 1956 publically signalled a campaign to end corruption. However, the socially conservative mayor’s attempts to avoid embarrassment over an expanding homosexual bar scene worked at cross purposes with his reformist agenda. Rather than attract outside attention to the city’s growing gay community, city hall denied the presence of these illicit businesses and in the process continued to provide opportunities for individual officers to extort bribes. Then, the “Gayola” scandal led to the criminal trial of several officers and exposed a systemic culture of intimidation and blackmailing of businesses catering to homosexual patrons. Officers repeatedly abused marginalized communities, as patrolmen trumped-up charges of vagrancy, disorderly conduct, or lewd behaviour. Officers typically acted with impunity. Discriminatory hiring practices and widespread patterns of brutality, harassment, and neglect bred further resentment and hostility against the sfpd.

Agee’s analysis illuminates the ways that the late fifties and the early sixties saw the growth of a cultural pluralism that stemmed primarily from growth advocates’ economic goals. Redevelopment aimed to attract and retain white-collared professionals moving into the city’s culturally rich and artistically avant-garde neighbourhoods. After several cases failed to sustain convictions of artists, booksellers, and entertainers for obscenity violations, journalists, business groups, and elected officials began to emphasize the economic benefits to be derived from a more tolerant attitude toward unconventional sexual behaviours and greater neighbourhood autonomy. City hall thus prioritized redevelopment over the improvement of existing neighbourhoods and the sfpd simultaneously refused to employ more community-oriented policing strategies to reduce violent crime.

Race-conscious protest by young and disaffected men in African American neighbourhoods never enjoyed political legitimacy in the media. Erotic poetry and art brought tourists to North Beach. Conversely, deindustrialization, unemployment, and segregation kept investors away from Hunters Point. The proliferation of gangs and a corresponding rise in street violence took its toll. When an officer shot and killed a car thief in 1966, a riot erupted. Some activists managed to organize grass-roots campaigns that demonstrated remarkable success in violence prevention, but by the early seventies, a lack of resources, fragmented leadership, and persistent problems exacerbated by drugs left most residents to fend for themselves.

In certain instances, the power of local interests at the neighbourhood level began to influence not only decisions and policies at city hall but also the changing professional and political strategies of the sfpd. When Mayor Joseph Alioto’s administration initiated a consolidation plan that closed a number of police...