Posts Tagged ‘San Diego Police Department’

“You can’t parade. Our orders are to prevent it.” In a moment there was a seething, screaming mass around the policemen. Staves and sticks began to fly.
–San Diego Sun, May 31, 1933

The story of a student demonstration that turned into a riot: The Young Communists.

The riot in Pantoja Park.

The cells at Police Headquarters at the foot of Market St. Courtesy San Diego Police Museum.

It was terrible. The screams of the dying and injured were ghastly. The heat was terrific. Flames leaped 20 feet high through the ventilators. –Battalion Chief Ed McLarney, San Diego Fire Department.

On February 4, 1942, an accident in the “drunk tank” of the City jail led to tragedy. The story of the Jail Fire of 1942.

Police Chief Harry Raymond

In the early 1900s, few jobs were more tenuous than Chief of the San Diego Police Department. The pressures of city politics kept careers short, averaging eleven months between 1927 and 1934. The tenure of Chief Harry J. Raymond was briefer than most, and maybe the strangest.

Raymond became chief on June 5, 1933. With more than twenty years of police experience, largely as an investigator for the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, he brought to the job “a reputation for efficiency in force management,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

But his appointment to the $300 per month job by City Manager Fred Lockwood was instantly questioned . . .

Read the complete story of the rise and fall of Harry Raymond.