Often they extorted money from these establishments. Officers could enforce formal legal codes over gay and lesbian bars. Instead, departments expected their patrol officers to use their discretion. So I back out and I go about my diligent business.Īs Mindermann’s recollections of bewilderment illustrate, postwar law enforcement leaders rarely prepared patrol officers for the day-to-day policing of gay and lesbian people. And I go, I better not do anything because there’s so many of them, and there’s just me, and I have no radio. They’ve never seen this guy before, you know. Could this be a-in the parlance of SFPD, could this be a fruit joint?. there’s, I guess, a small dance floor, because I never quite got back that way. And I’m shocked because I see nothing but men down the bar, and in the back. Speaking with me years later, he recounted this discovery and his feelings of confusion and vulnerability: On his first night out, he stumbled upon the Cable Car Village, a gay bar. In 1960 Patrolman John Mindermann, a rookie officer in the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), was assigned to San Francisco’s Polk Gulch neighborhood.
