August Vollmer - Trivia

Criminologist, born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. After service in the Spanish-American War, he became the chief of police in Berkeley, CA (1905–32). He reorganized the police department of San Diego (1917) and Los Angeles (1923–4) and established professional police administrations at the universities of Chicago and California. He wrote The Criminal (1949), Crime and the State Police, and other books.

Vollmer was born in New Orleans to German immigrant parents. In 1891, the Vollmer family moved across the bay to Berkeley. Before he was 20, August helped organize the North Berkeley Volunteer Fire Department, and in 1897, was awarded the Berkeley Fireman medal. He supported his mother and the rest of his family as a partner in Patterson and Vollmer, a hay, grain, wood and coal supply store, at the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Vine Street near a fire station north of downtown Berkeley. Vollmer returned to Berkeley in 1900 and began working for the local post office. In 1904, he won notoriety as a local hero after he leapt onto a runaway railroad freight car on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley and applied its brakes, preventing a disastrous collision with a passenger coach loaded with commuters at the Berkeley Station.

Drawing on his military experience, and his own research, Vollmer reorganized the Berkeley police force. Vollmer had discovered that very little literature existed in the United States on the subject of police work, so he located and read a number of European works on the subject, in particular, Criminal Psychology, by Hans Gross,an Austrian criminologist, and Memoirs of Vidocq, by Eugene Francois Vidocq, head of the detective division of the French police in Paris. He established a bicycle patrol and created the first centralized police records system, designed to streamline and organize criminal investigations.

In 1907, Vollmer was re-elected town marshal. He was also elected president of the California Association of Police Chiefs, even though, by title, he was not yet a police chief himself. In 1909, Berkeley created the office of police chief, and Vollmer became the first to hold that office.

In the ensuing years, Vollmer's reputation as the "father of modern law enforcement" grew. He was the first chief to require that police officers attain college degrees, and persuaded the University of California to teach criminal justice.

Vollmer was also the first police chief to create a motorized force, placing officers on motorcycles, and in cars so that they could patrol a broader area with greater efficiency.

In 1921, Vollmer was elected president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

Vollmer left the Berkeley Police Department for a brief stint as police chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from 1923-24, but returned upon being disillusioned by the extent of corruption and hostility towards leadership coming from outside the department.

He retired from the Berkeley Police in 1932 as his eyesight began to fail.

Trivia

Bald Peak in the Berkeley Hills was re-named Vollmer Peak in honor of August Vollmer. In 1926, Vollmer played himself in the silent serial "Officer 444" which was shot in Berkeley under the direction of John Ford's brother Francis Ford. Carte, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) The Berkeley Police Story, by Alfred E.