When I was working on my most recent Memories post, I wanted to check some details, and possibly push past the haze to discover some of the places about which I was writing. In particular I tried to locate the precinct to which we drove in order to make our report about the robbery, and hence perhaps find out the name of the night club next door.
A Google search with the words “San Francisco Police precincts 1977” landed me on the Internet Archive site – and the SFPD annual report for the year of 1977. I was rewarded with a plethora of statistics and even some useful info in the thickets.
Our request for police service on that Saturday night in 1977 was one of 424,368 that year, and became more specifically one of 105,374 criminal incidents reported. Curiously the report we gave them was one of a grand total of 140,979, so I guess 35,605 of those they took in, were non-criminal. (I wonder what constituted a non-criminal report back then).
They did some comparisons to the year before and were happy to report that the incidents of robbery in 1977 were down in the city by 17.8% – (from a total of 6640 in 1976, down to 5456). Seeing that made me feel better, too.
Then I saw the category entitled malicious mischief. I briefly considered this designation, as I thought our broken window might have fallen under that rubric. Its incidents were down only 1.5%.
There was a map included with the annual report showing the various police districts in the city. And wouldn’t you know it, Market Street makes up the boundary of two, the A and B districts.
So, in which district had our car break-in been reported? With no guidelines to go by, it was difficult to make a determination. If it had been presented to Solomon and he asked me which side of Market Street we had parked on, he would have gone with the B District. But I have a suspicion that we made our report to a station somewhere in the A region, and they should have gotten credit for it.
So armed with these pertinent facts, I found a SFPD records website, and filled out a PDF request form to order copies of the police incident report. After a four day wait, I received an email back from their clerk, who reported that all the records from that time, had been “purged/destroyed.”
I guess just like Vegas, what happened in San Francisco, stayed in San Francisco, except for the official reports about what had happened in San Francisco.
Aside – I discovered some years after this incident that the stolen 8mm Bell & Howell movie camera had been to San Francisco before. It had been in my Mom’s family from at least the 1940’s. Among the footage is a shot that clearly was Coit Tower and a couple more scenes were taken in Chinatown.
Aside aside – Two police TV shows set in San Francisco – McMillan & Wife, and The Streets of San Francisco finished their runs in 1977. Coincidence?
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