In San Francisco, it has always been hard to tell the cops from the robbers. From the gold-rush days when Chief Malachi Fallon's badge-wearing bandits roamed the streets to the turn of the century when the SFPD's Hall of Justice stood as a monument to corruption before falling to pieces in the great quake of '06, the city's law enforcement has been a tale of duality.
Mark Twain's ink flowed freely with scathing critiques of San Francisco’s police force, more akin to a criminal syndicate, with officers preying on the citizenry as much as protecting them. The city's underbelly thrived, not just in vice but in the corruption that festered within the very departments meant to combat it.
From the Chinatown Tong wars to the bootleg battles of the roaring '20s, San Francisco's cops played both sides of the law, often with a wink and a nod from city officials. The Lanza Crime Family's rise in the '30s painted a city where the line between mob and law was a mere smudge, with police captains carving out their own criminal empires, basically running organized crime in the city.
Grand Jury report after Grand Jury report exposed the systematic rot, where police took a cut from every illegal enterprise, turning a blind eye or offering an active hand in crime. Yet, even with the occasional purge, the corrupt heart of San Francisco's police beat on, undeterred, suggesting that perhaps in this city, the cops and robbers were two sides of the same coin, spun by the same hand.
Here, the badge often meant business, but whose business was anyone's guess.
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