“The city was in panic,” retired homicide inspector Gus Coreris, who was in charge of the task force to hunt down the killers, told CBS Bay Area. “People were scared going out at night.” So Mayor Joe Alioto instituted a city-wide stop and search of any Black men between the ages of 20 and 30 who were 5 feet, 9 inches to 6 feet tall and matched a composite picture the police had made of one suspect, according to UPI. “This is an extraordinary situation and it calls for extreme measures,” the mayor told the news agency in April 1974, claiming it wasn’t about race. Many begged to differ.
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The police stopped and questioned residents and gave them a “zebra check card” that they had to show when stopped. “It was the first time, in my recollection, that Blacks were considered to be serial killers,” San Francisco resident and activist Darrell Rogers told FoundSF. He and 18 other young Black men started “Operation Cleanup,” a group in opposition to the city’s abuse of power that refused to submit to the searches. According to Diva, another organization, the Committee Against Racism, rallied against the police procedures that one member called “a racist attack ” since Black men were “being stopped and given ID cards and arrested and intimidated.” In the end, it wasn’t the harsh random stop-and-search police tactics that caught the serial killers, but the help of an informant.
