The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950-1972

by Christopher Lowen Agee

During the Sixties the nation turned its eyes to San Francisco as the city's police force clashed with movements for free speech, civil rights, and sexual liberation. These conflicts on the street forced Americans to reconsider the role of the police officer in a democracy. In The Streets of San Francisco Christopher Lowen Agee explores the surprising and influential ways in which San Francisco liberals answered that question, ultimately turning to the police as partners, and reshaping understandings of crime, policing, and democracy.

The Streets of San Francisco uncovers the seldom reported, street-level interactions between police officers and San Francisco residents and finds that police discretion was the defining feature of mid-century law enforcement. Postwar police officers enjoyed great autonomy when dealing with North Beach beats, African American gang leaders, gay and lesbian bar owners, Haight-Ashbury hippies, artists who created sexually explicit works, Chinese American entrepreneurs, and a wide range of other San Franciscans. Unexpectedly, this police independence grew into a source of both concern and inspiration for the thousands of young professionals streaming into the city's growing financial district. These young professionals ultimately used the issue of police discretion to forge a new cosmopolitan liberal coalition that incorporated both marginalized San Franciscans and rank-and-file police officers. The success of this model in San Francisco resulted in the rise of cosmopolitan liberal coalitions throughout the country, and today, liberal cities across America ground themselves in similar understandings of democracy, emphasizing both broad diversity and strong policing.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

A workmanlike effort that provides a reasonable if unexciting portrait of how the police force in San Francisco professionalized and then negotiated a new political place for itself between the 1940s and the 1970s, a time of tumultuous upheaval in the city and country. The SFPD comes across as being quite typical in its transformation, except of course that it had to learn to operate in what was rapidly emerging as one of the most liberal cities in the country. The chapters are organized both by chronology and neighborhood, and often meander quite a long way away from policing, perhaps inevitably given the archival inaccessibility.

[Todd Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

meticulously researched and well written. the research, including first hand accounts from police officers, is particularly compelling. additionally, the section on AA-police relationship is especially interesting given the events in Missouri and in New York in`14. strongly recommended for anyone with an interest in San Francisco history.

[Mills College Library]

979.461 A2654 2016