The old photograph depicting a street scene of cops, a pile of drugs and a crowd of Chinese onlookers had hung on the walls of the San Francisco Police Academy for years. Old-time Chinatown residents used to tell stories of a public destruction of opium in the middle of Chinatown in the early 1900s.
One police department historian, who rescued the photo from the routine destruction of long-forgotten case files, guessed that its date was 1890. The photo also appeared in Anthony Lee’s hardcover book, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco Chinatown (attributed to an unknown photographer, circa 1921), and Judy Yung’s new pictorial, San Francisco Chinatown. Both books credit the archives of the California Society of Pioneers.
But none of the years seemed appropriate. Practically none of the Chinese men is seen wearing a queue, the pre-1911 symbol of subjugation to imperial Manchu rule. Senior archivist Pat Keats of the California Society of Pioneers discredited the 1920 date by observing that the styles of female hats worn in the photo were popular around the time of World War I.
Former deputy police chief Kevin Mullen, a 26-year veteran and local criminal justice historian dismissed the photo as an operation by Sgt. Jack Manion’s legendary Chinatown Squad and deduced a different range of years based on the style of patrolman uniform worn. “The photo was taken before Manion’s tenure which began in 1921, but also undoubtedly sometime after the formation of the Republic [of China],” he wrote.
“The helmet remained as standard uniform until November 1914,” Mullen said, “which would tend to put this photo somewhere in that period.” Mullen added that prior to that year only police commanders wore uniform caps. “Patrol officers wore the helmets and sergeants on up wore the caps from 1896 to 1914. Even after 1914, some officers resisted changing to the caps because of the expense of acquiring the new ones. So the helmet conceivably could have been worn into 1915.”
Mullen’s own copy of the photo was culled from the collection of former Police Chief Jesse Cook, maintained by the Bancroft Library. Unfortunately, the late Chief Cook had written his own caption, inscribing, “Burning opium and opium pipes on Dupont St. between Clay and Washington streets by U.S. Government officers about 1917.”
Mullen finally found the answer on a page from the San Francisco Call from May 10, 1912. The Call reported that the members of the California Board of Pharmacy had chosen “Washington street, near Dupont, in the center of Chinatown” as the site for the “object lesson,” so that the “the Chinese of San Francisco might be properly impressed with the work carried on … to stop the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs. … ”
The public burning — the culmination of a yearlong effort by the state to seize illegal substances and prosecute hundreds of drug offenders — occurred in the afternoon of May 9th, and it was recorded by “moving picture men,” using then-new motion picture technology. The camera appears in the photo, but the whereabouts of the film footage taken on that day are unknown.
Thanks to good police work by a veteran cop, this “cold case” was solved.
Doug Chan is an attorney and a former San Francisco police commissioner.