Richard Hongisto

Richard D. Hongisto
Chief of the San Francisco Police Department
In office April 1, 1992 – May 15, 1992
Mayor	Frank Jordan
Preceded by	William Casey
Succeeded by	Anthony Ribera
Assessor-Recorder of San Francisco
In office January 8, 1991 – April 1, 1992
Preceded by	???
Succeeded by	Doris M. Ward
Member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors from the at-large district
In office January 8, 1981 – January 8, 1991
Preceded by	District-based elections
Succeeded by	Kevin Shelley
Constituency	seat 2
Acting Commissioner of the New York Department of Corrections
In office 1978–1979
Governor	Hugh Carey
Preceded by	Benjamin Ward
Succeeded by	???
Chief of the Cleveland Division of Police
In office December 14, 1977 – March 24, 1978
Mayor	Dennis Kucinich
Preceded by	Michael Aherns
Succeeded by	Jeffrey Fox
31st Sheriff of San Francisco
In office January 8, 1972 – December 11, 1977
Preceded by	Matthew C. Carberry
Succeeded by	Eugene A. Brown
Personal details
Born	Richard Duane Hongisto (1936-12-16)December 16, 1936 Bovey, Minnesota, U.S.
Died	November 4, 2004(2004-11-04) (aged 67) San Francisco, California, U.S.
Police career
Department	San Francisco Sheriff's Department Cleveland Division of Police San Francisco Police Department
Service years	San Francisco: 1958–1977 Cleveland: 1977–1978 San Francisco: 1992
Rank	Sheriff Chief

Richard Duane Hongisto (December 16, 1936, Bovey, Minnesota – November 4, 2004, San Francisco, California) was a businessman, politician, sheriff, and police chief of San Francisco, California, and Cleveland, Ohio.

Early life and education

Of Finnish descent, Hongisto was the son of Gladys Longrie and Raymond Hongisto. In 1942, Dick moved to San Francisco with his parents and brother Don. Dick grew up in the Sunset District, where he graduated from George Washington High School. He later attended San Francisco City College. While completing a bachelor's degree at San Francisco State University, Hongisto became an officer of the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD).

Career

Early career

As a police officer, Hongisto earned a reputation for activism, fighting discrimination within the police force and against police brutality. He was a co-founder of Officers for Justice, an organization of officers who were primarily racial minorities or gay.

Hongisto's activism made him controversial among the ranks of the SFPD, but at the same time he was a popular public figure. He ran for sheriff in 1971, and was elected — an event that shocked the San Francisco political establishment. The incumbent, Matthew Carberry, had been a four-term sheriff, was well-connected politically, and had been considered a shoo-in for a return to the job.

Hongisto's election had been orchestrated methodically by computer analyst Les Morgan, using the then-new idea of precinct analysis of voting trends. Hongisto was considered the first candidate for public office in San Francisco to be elected largely by outsiders: gay, Latino, and other minority voters who had a strong voting presence, but who had been ignored by the political establishment.

He was the first sheriff to hire gay and lesbian deputies, and later became embroiled in controversy when he deliberately delayed the eviction of residents from the International Hotel, a residential hotel in Manilatown.

International Hotel manager Joe Diones looks out at protesters protecting the hotel during an anti-eviction rally January 1977.

After a long period where he refused to order the eviction, which included time spent in the San Mateo County jail on contempt of court charges, Hongisto eventually carried out the mass eviction, which earned him the enmity of some of the very people he tried to protect.

Cleveland

See also: Mayoral administration of Dennis Kucinich and Cleveland Division of Police

After serving as the sheriff in San Francisco, Hongisto briefly moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1977, where he served as police chief under Mayor Dennis Kucinich. His penchant for controversy, and conflicts with Kucinich, eventually led to his being fired by the mayor on live local television. In Cleveland his firing sparked a recall drive to remove Kucinich from office.

New York State

The Governor of the State of New York then invited Hongisto to manage that state's prison system. Hongisto accepted the challenge of reforming a system that had been plagued by riots and unrest within several of its facilities. Permanent appointment to this position required confirmation by the state senate, which was not forthcoming. Hongisto therefore returned to San Francisco to run for supervisor in 1980.

Return to San Francisco

Upon his return to San Francisco, Hongisto was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, where he helped to place Proposition M, a measure which would limit construction of high rise commercial buildings, on the public ballot. The measure passed overwhelmingly, and has to this day continued to impact the development of San Francisco's skyline.

With the endorsement of then-Mayor Art Agnos, Hongisto later ran for the office of Assessor.

In 1991, he ran for mayor but did not make the run-off, coming in fourth. After declining to endorse Agnos for re-election as mayor, in a race won by police chief Frank Jordan, Hongisto was appointed in 1992 by Jordan to be San Francisco's police chief.

Hongisto's tenure as police chief lasted only six weeks, and was punctuated by controversy over his handling of demonstrations and riots which occurred in the wake of the Rodney King police brutality trial in Los Angeles. Hongisto cordoned off an entire neighborhood in the Mission district on a Saturday afternoon, establishing a net that saw the arrests of all people on the street, demonstrators and ordinary citizens alike. Hongisto had rented city buses to transport the arrested citizens, and they were processed at a warehouse on San Francisco's wharfs. Instead of merely citing and releasing those arrested, Hongisto ordered that they be arrested and processed at the Santa Rita jail in Dublin (Alameda County), rather than in San Francisco County, thus ensuring that they would not be able to avail themselves of their civil rights and return to San Francisco. This enraged progressive activists and civil libertarians as well as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which ordered Hongisto to release the citizens he had arrested. On the following Saturday, Hongisto ordered police to disrupt another demonstration and arrested demonstrators with no order to disperse. Both incidences were later the targets of class action suits against the city of San Francisco, although the former, undertaken by the Lawyer's Guild, would not be resolved for nearly a decade.

Soon thereafter, a gay and lesbian community newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Times, published a cover graphic of Hongisto's head pasted on the body of a lesbian activist. The activist, dressed in a police uniform, held a giant baton with one end protruding from the groin area as if it were an erect penis. The headline screamed, "Dick's Cool New Tool: Martial Law", in reference to the police actions. What happened afterwards is subject to dispute. Hongisto claimed that he had asked members of the police union to gather copies of the paper to show members of the rank and file what he was enduring in the activist press, in reaction to their criticism of his supposedly failing to properly defend their conduct of the arrests during the King riots. Around 2,000 copies of the free papers were taken from news racks by three officers and later found stored at the Mission District police station. Hongisto was publicly accused of ordering the confiscation of the papers in attempt at censorship, a charge he continued to deny up to his death. After a hearing, the San Francisco Police Commission found him culpable, and Mayor Jordan dismissed him. One of those three officers, Gary Delagnes, later became president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association.

Later years

Hongisto left public life to become a full-time businessman and real estate investor, apart from an unsuccessful run for County Supervisor in 2000.

Hongisto died of a heart attack on November 4, 2004, at the age of 67, leaving behind a son and daughter. He married four times, and was living with a 31-year-old girlfriend at the time of his death.

Electoral history

Richard Hongisto electoral history

San Francisco sheriff election, 1971 Party Candidate Votes % Nonpartisan Richard Hongisto 81,403 36.33% Nonpartisan Matthew Carberry (incumbent) 59,848 26.71% Nonpartisan Matthew O'Connor 49,802 22.23% Nonpartisan William Bigarani 33,015 14.73% Total votes 224,068 100.00% Democratic gain from Republican San Francisco sheriff election, 1975 Party Candidate Votes % Nonpartisan Richard Hongisto (incumbent) 96,009 49.62% Nonpartisan Michael Nevin 30,861 15.95% Nonpartisan Eugene Pratt 27,126 14.02% Nonpartisan William Bigarani 23,436 12.11% Nonpartisan Walter Rabenorth 8,343 4.31% Nonpartisan Bob Geary 7,723 3.99% Total votes 193,498 100.00% Democratic hold San Francisco Board of Supervisors election, 1980 Party Candidate Votes % San Francisco Board of Supervisors election, 1982 Party Candidate Votes % San Francisco Board of Supervisors election, 1986 Party Candidate Votes % San Francisco assessor-recorder election, 1990 Party Candidate Votes % San Francisco mayoral primary election, 1991 Party Candidate Votes % Nonpartisan Frank Jordan 59,928 31.88% Nonpartisan Art Agnos (incumbent) 51,714 27.51% Nonpartisan Angela Alioto 34,910 18.57% Nonpartisan Tom Hsieh 18,241 9.70% Nonpartisan Richard Hongisto 17,663 9.40% Nonpartisan Gloria La Riva 2,552 1.36% Nonpartisan Joni Jacobs 1,397 0.74% Nonpartisan Cesar Ascarrunz 724 0.39% Nonpartisan Ellis Keyes 337 0.18% Nonpartisan Dehnert Queen 310 0.17% Nonpartisan Peter Planteen 214 0.11% Total votes 187,990 100.00% Democratic hold San Francisco Board of Supervisors election, 1992 Party Candidate Votes % San Francisco Board of Supervisors primary election (district 5), 2000 Party Candidate Votes % Nonpartisan Matt Gonzalez 12,743 42.30% Nonpartisan Juanita Owens 8,589 28.51% Nonpartisan Agar Jaicks 3,621 12.02% Nonpartisan Holman Turner, Jr. 1,273 4.23% Nonpartisan Richard Hongisto 1,210 4.02% Nonpartisan Joe Konopka 789 2.62% Nonpartisan Jay Bagi 743 2.47% Nonpartisan Nicholas Gaffney 504 1.67% Nonpartisan Demian Barrett 324 1.08% Nonpartisan John Palmer 163 0.54% Nonpartisan Rob Anderson 106 0.35% Nonpartisan Write-in votes 60 0.20% Invalid or blank votes 5,990 16.59% Total votes 36,115 100.00% San Francisco assessor-recorder primary election, 2002 Party Candidate Votes % Nonpartisan Mabel Teng 39,648 30.62% Nonpartisan Doris M. Ward (incumbent) 29,414 22.71% Nonpartisan Ronald Chun 24,346 18.80% Nonpartisan John Farrell 18,784 14.51% Nonpartisan Richard Hongisto 11,446 8.84% Nonpartisan Jim Rodriguez 5,714 4.41% Nonpartisan Write-in votes 141 0.11% Total votes 129,493 100.00%

External links

• SF Chronicle obituary
• George Washington High School GWHS, San Francisco.