The Chinatown Detail

For corruption, vice and violence, few cities could match 19th century San Francisco. Opium dens, brothels, gambling parlors, Shanghai saloons and gangs flourished by dint of maximum bribes to police and minimum legal scrutiny. Civic morality occasionally counterattacked the Barbary Coast and its adjunct, Chinatown; in 1875 authorities formed an elite corps of policemen to check Chinatown's bloody tong wars.

The Chinatown detail's first action --against the secret protection societies whose Mafia-like gang wars had terrorized Chinatown--was in the style of the times. The cops descended on tong headquarters with axes and smashed everything in sight. The subsidence of the tong wars was due less to the squad's enforcement than to battle attrition, but the Chinatown detail stayed. Ignorant of Chinese customs and language, the cops often reminded local residents of the tyrannical blue-jacketed officials of the Emperor's court. The detail went undercover--in heavy serge suits, bowlers and handlebar mustaches. Generations of San Franciscans grew up on pulp-magazine accounts of their exploits.

In 1921 the group underwent another sartorial change, this time as longshoremen. The slouch-cap and high-necked-sweater camouflage was given away by their standard weaponry--pickaxes and sledgehammers. However, the unit evolved into what one member called "probably the first community-relations bureau in the country." The policemen learned some Chinese and provided a link between the Chinese population and the bureaucracy of a bewildering Western society.

Last week, after 95 years, the Chinatown detail, already reduced to only six men, was dissolved. Some leaders of the law-abiding Chinese community felt that the detail represented a subtle discrimination. No other ethnic neighborhood has a special police force. Police Chief Alfred Nelder said: "The time has come when they should be more identifiable in a uniform." But one of the Chinatown detail men who put on the blues for the first time had another viewpoint: "It was a lot easier to be friends without the uniform."

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