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Back to the Haight Street sweep, the cops were going door by door pulling people out of those apartments. Have to assume they knew who they wanted, who they were going to bust and where they lived. These places were very open. People invited strangers to their apartments all the time. It was the Aquarian Age, free love and people wanted to think the best of everyone else. Many were trying to create alternative social concepts. Most of these people quite frankly thought of themselves as good people and were not particularly adept at an understanding that others would not agree with their self-assessment. It would never have occurred to many of them that they were letting into their homes intelligence people from the city constabulary.
Across the street from the restaurant were I would eat each evening there was a newspaper and magazine shop on the corner of Haight and Ashbury. Every early evening there was a dark swarthy looking guy, who looked to be around thirty years of age, hanging out, just standing around sometimes reading stuff. I always wondered what he was always doing there. I mostly thought of him as some kind of spy either Mafia or police, but God only knows what or why, I have never been able to discern.
The Haight Street police sweeps took place as I remember on three consecutive nights. On one of these evenings, walking home after my observations, I was on Page street heading east. A plain clothes car with six burly men in it, helmets on the rear window deck, pulled over to the curb just ahead of me. There were about six people on their porch having a little outing, talking and joking amongst themselves.
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