Captain Rick Bruce (Ret.)

Richard “Rick” Bruce was born on March 13, 1956. As a young boy he attended El Rancho Elementary School, Alta Loma Junior High School, and El Camino High School in South San Francisco, California. During his formidable years he played football which taught him the value of sportsmanship, respect for oneself and others, and discipline. He owes much of his success to his mentor and football coach; Craig Galli, who later went on to become a Mountain View police officer in the Peninsula.

Rick joined the San Francisco Police Department in 1975 as a police cadet, and in March of 1977 entered the academy as an officer, becoming the youngest police officer in the department at the time. Rick worked at most of the police stations across the city as he rose through the ranks, and was assigned as the captain of Ingleside Station in 1997.

“There was a long-standing gang war taking place in the Sunnydale Housing Development that had claimed a large number of lives, and we weren’t having much success in controlling the violence at the time,” Rick remembers. “So I worked with the Housing Authority to open the first fully staffed sub-station in San Francisco public housing, and I assigned three officers to the development.” What was so unique about this effort were the youth outreach programs that were put in place, and the officers became coaches and mentors to the children living in the development.

That same year, Deputy Chief Diarmuid Philpott asked Rick to join the board of directors of the San Francisco Police Activities League, and he is now the longest serving member on the board of directors. In 2004, Rick was assigned as the captain of Bayview Station and opened police sub-stations in the three largest housing developments in the district.

Rick started e-mailing the residents of the Bayview District daily to give them the latest crime information from their neighborhoods, but he also kept them updated about how the kids were doing with their officer-mentors. “One day I sent out an e-mail informing the residents that many of the kids were lacking baseball gloves, and in the next couple of days, we collected so many baseball gloves that every child in our program now had their own glove.” A few months later, Rick arranged to transport the kids from Hunter’s Point out to Harding Park twice a week to participate in a junior golf program, and when he told the Bayview community about this new program, so many residents dropped off golf clubs at the station that they filled up a hallway.

In late 2004, Rick opened a police office in the run-down Milton Myer Recreation Center on Kiska Road at the top of Hunter’s Point Hill. Several officers were assigned to the Rec Center every day after school, and the neighborhood mothers soon began referring to the old gym as a “safe zone,” knowing their children would be safe from the neighborhood violence within the gym that was now staffed by Bayview police officers.

“I wanted to get the old gym refurbished, and had a commitment from the local unions to donate the material and labor needed to give it a facelift, but then I decided to meet with the Executive Director of the San Francisco Boys and Girls Clubs in an effort to see if they would be interested in taking over the gym and clubhouse.” What followed were months of behind the scenes efforts, and eventually the San Francisco Boys and Girls Club committed to a total renovation of the clubhouse and gymnasium. Those efforts resulted in what is now called the Willie Mays Clubhouse, and it’s the only Boys and Girls Club facility with a full-time police officers assigned to it, as it continues to be the “safe haven” that Rick envisioned for the kids living in Hunter’s Point.

Rick retired from the SFPD in 2005, but has remained an active board member of the San Francisco Police Activities League, and continues to coach and mentor San Francisco children to this day. “I still believe that the PAL can make a difference in kids’ lives, by keeping kids off the streets and on the fields. I still volunteer as a coach because I believe that I can be a positive influence on the kids I mentor.”