Palo Alto History

Jim Zurcher: Chief "Super Pig"

Things got personal in the demonstration battles of the 1960s and early ‘70s, when student protesters were pitted against the nation’s young cops.    The students, largely from white-collar suburban homes, were inspired by a cultural and civil rights movement that promised to change the country.  On the other side, newly hired police officers saw themselves as the thin blue line protecting their communities from the increasing chaos and disorder.  There was little common ground between the two groups.  Students characterized the police as uneducated pigs with a penchant for giving beatings, while most cops saw the students as privileged, spoiled drop-outs just looking to cause trouble.  Tensions ran high in nearly every encounter.

Jim Zurcher, who took over as police chief in 1971, tried to diffuse those tensions in Palo Alto.  A folk guitar player, marathon runner, and possibly the best pistol-shooting police chief in the country, it would be Zurcher’s attempt to bridge the gap between police and protesters that would bring him both hearty praise and heavy criticism. 

A firm believer in both the letter of the law and First Amendment rights, 37-year-old Zurcher brought a new tolerance and broad-mindedness to a dogmatic old-guard police force.  By the time he retired sixteen years later, the Palo Alto Police Department was a fundamentally different organization — more open, diverse, and responsive to the community.  But it wouldn’t come easy.  Many of his policies would strike at the heart of what older officers saw as the essence of police work.  And in his first months on the job, the relationship between the Palo Alto police and Stanford student protesters would reach a new low.

On April 9, 1971 Stanford students and other protesters staged a violent sit-in, barricading themselves inside the Stanford Medical Center to protest the firing of black custodian Sam Bridges.  After a 30-hour occupation, the PAPD surrounded the demonstrators and attempted to batter down the door.   But the officers were blindsided by protesters wielding chair legs, iron clubs, and a relentless fire hose.  Zurcher later called it “the most vicious and unprovoked attack on police I have ever witnessed.” 

In the fracas, thirteen cops were injured, two of them seriously.  The incident augmented the already heightened tension between protesters and police in Palo Alto.  Yet it seemed to give Zurcher new resolve to find mutual understanding.  Still settling into his office, the new chief sought to change both attitudes within the department and the image the PAPD projected to the outside community. 

Inside the department, Zurcher pursued the type of systemic changes that were bound to cause internal division.  In his first months on the job, Zurcher replaced the old paramilitary command organization with a more progressive team-management approach.  He sent cops for training in conflict management, saying that the police were there to “mediate disputes, not merely to ticket and arrest” — an opinion that did not please some of his older lieutenants and sergeants. He also favored crime prevention methods and theories of community policing which were seen as rather avant-garde in those days.  Zurcher later said he put hard-nose officers with a reputation for beating and harassing demonstrators on the midnight “graveyard shift,” while shifting many discontented officers to other jobs.  Some veterans simply retired rather than accept the department’s new doctrine.

Zurcher’s proudest accomplishment was bringing women into the Palo Alto police force.  He gets credit for hiring Palo Alto’s first female cop (1971), first female lieutenant (1982) and first female captain (1985) — changes for which he received little support from his own officers at the time.  He also furthered gains by Palo Alto’s black, Hispanic, and Asian officers.

Meanwhile, Zurcher tried to reach out to the protesters, saying that he saw the police “as advocates of the people, instead of adversaries.”  In an attempt to humanize his own force, he took to drawing himself in a non-human form.  At a 1972 demonstration against Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard, demonstrators received leaflets showing the chief as the “Superpig,” a cartoon swine wearing the chief’s badge and flashing the peace sign.  Using the radicals’ most incendiary name-calling epithet in a little old-fashioned reverse psychology, Zurcher attempted to turn the tables on the police-protester relationship.  As he said later, “The protesters always leafleted everyone else, so I thought, why not leaflet them?”

The pamphlet contained some “suggestions for peaceful demonstration from Palo Alto’s Superpig.”  It stated that “If the President and the leaders of the People’s Republic of China can normalize relations between two opposing philosophies, I’m sure we can cooperate to carry on a peaceful demonstration.  We are here to insure the safety of all those present.  That includes those wishing to demonstrate peacefully.  We ask that you let our officers guide your march and assist you in crossing any streets.”

Naturally, there was a backlash from the department’s old guard.  One of his officers called it “highly unprofessional for a chief to label himself ‘super pig.’  It makes us piglets….We fail to see any humor or levity in it.”  Zurcher later apologized, opting instead for the image of a smiling cartoon chief with a hovering halo.  But his earlier cartoon visage was forever immortalized when the Zurcher “Superpig” became the subject of a song on a Cleveland radio station. 

And Zurcher’s original thinking wasn’t just limited to cartoon illustrations.  He also brought innovative ideas to potentially dangerous situations.  When radical left-wing Venceremos members were accused of aiding in a murder, they holed themselves up inside a house on Channing Avenue.  The San Bernardino Sheriff’s department, with plans to break down the door, was gearing up for a potentially deadly shoot-out.  But Zurcher had the house surrounded and successfully talked the suspects out without a shot fired.  Later, when a torch-lit peace march down University Avenue presented a fire risk, Zurcher had the PAPD purchase 500 candles and pass them out in exchange for torches.

Not to say that he wasn’t tough.  Zurcher established effective Embarcadero Road speed traps, closed down prostitution houses disguised as massage parlors, and cracked down on local burglars in South Palo Alto.  He also stood by his officers’ right in 1971 to raid the Stanford Daily’s press offices looking for photographic evidence against the Medical Center attackers — although the decision to enter the newspaper headquarters was made without his authorization.  The paper sued the department and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court before the PAPD won. 

Since Zurcher was the head of the police force, the case became known as Zurcher vs. Stanford Daily, ironically forever branding the chief’s name on the conservative side of a case that one can find today in any law school textbook.  After being portrayed in national editorial cartoons as a Gestapo-like gun wielding brute, Zurcher took to wearing a T-shirt proclaiming “I am not an ogre.” 

By the time Zurcher retired in 1987 after sixteen years as Palo Alto’s top cop, much had changed in both the city and the country.  Long gone were the days of furniture-throwing radicals and Palo Alto policemen in riot gear.  A calmer tide of history had washed away much of the bad blood between the PAPD and the community it served.  Still, looking back on the progressive policies that have become standard Palo Alto police practice, there no doubt that the innovations of the “Chief Superpig” played a major role.