William J. Quinn
About
William J. Quinn (April 23, 1883 – October 10, 1963) was a San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) chief. A native of San Francisco, California, he attended Lincoln Grammar School, Sacred Heart College and studied law at Saint Ignatius College (now the University of San Francisco), graduating in 1925. He walked his first police beat in 1906.
He served as chief of police in San Francisco from January 1, 1929, until February 15, 1940. Quinn presided over the modernization of the SFPD and is credited with establishing the first juvenile bureau and putting radios in police cars. He was chief during the Jessie Scott Hughes murder trial of Frank Egan and the 1934 San Francisco General Strike on the waterfront where he took a rock to the head, and during the period of the investigations by Edwin Atherton who published the Atherton Report on police graft and corruption.
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