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

Abstract

The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972, by Christopher Lowen Agee. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 328 pp. $45.00 US (cloth), $27.00 US (paper). 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 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. …