Early career Hongisto was a co-founder of Officers for Justice, an organization of officers who were primarily racial minorities or gay. Hongisto ran for sheriff in 1971, defeating the incumbent, Matthew Carberry, who had been a four-term sheriff. 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, San Francisco, next to
Chinatown, 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. 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. 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. 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. == Personal life ==