19 Facts About Richard Hongisto

Richard Duane Hongisto was a businessman, politician, sheriff, and police chief of San Francisco, California, and Cleveland, Ohio.

Richard Hongisto was a co-founder of Officers for Justice, an organization of officers who were primarily racial minorities or gay.

Richard Hongisto's activism made him controversial among the ranks of the SFPD, but at the same time he was a popular public figure.

Richard Hongisto's election had been orchestrated methodically by computer analyst Les Morgan, using the then-new idea of precinct analysis of voting trends.

Richard Hongisto was considered the first candidate for public office in San Francisco to be elected largely by outsiders: gay, Latino, and other minority voters who had a strong voting presence, but who had been ignored by the political establishment.

Richard Hongisto 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.

The Governor of the State of New York then invited Richard Hongisto to manage that state's prison system.

Richard Hongisto accepted the challenge of reforming a system that had been plagued by riots and unrest within several of its facilities.

Richard Hongisto therefore returned to San Francisco to run for supervisor in 1980.

Richard 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.

Richard Hongisto had rented city buses to transport the arrested citizens, and they were processed at a warehouse on San Francisco's wharfs.

Soon thereafter, a gay and lesbian community newspaper, the San Francisco Bay Times, published a cover graphic of Richard Hongisto's head pasted on the body of a lesbian activist.

Richard 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.

Richard 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.

In 1993, Richard Hongisto married Susan Chavez, who was 23 years his junior.

On September 24,1994, Chavez Richard Hongisto died of an asthma attack brought on by smoking crack cocaine.

Richard Hongisto left public life to become a full-time businessman and real estate investor, apart from an unsuccessful run for County Supervisor in 2000.

Richard Hongisto died of a heart attack on November 4,2004, at the age of 67, leaving behind a son and daughter.

Richard Hongisto married four times, and was living with a 31-year-old girlfriend at the time of his death.