Fred Lau
American police chief
Fred Harry Lau (born June 26, 1949) is a former Chief of Police for San Francisco, having served from 1996–2002. He was the first Asian American to ever hold that position, and has been called the first Chinese-American to lead the police in any major American city. In 2013, he became the TSA Federal Security Director of the San Francisco International Airport.
Biography
Early life and education
A third-generation San Franciscan and Cantonese speaker, Lau was born at San Francisco Chinese Hospital in Chinatown, San Francisco; he grew up in and around his family's business (Wing Duck Import/Export) on Grant Avenue in Chinatown. He attended Garfield Elementary and Francisco Middle schools, graduating from Galileo High School. As a teenager, he participated in the American Friends Service Committee anti-gang Youth for Service program. He attended and graduated from City College of San Francisco, and eventually obtained a Bachelor of Arts in 1997 from San Francisco State University.
San Francisco Police
After successfully challenging a 5'8" height requirement in 1970, Lau entered the SF Police Academy in 1971 and joined the San Francisco Police Department following graduation, becoming the fifth Chinese-American member of the SFPD. It is not documented whether Lau participated in the 1975 police-officers strike, although supervisors, inspectors and African-American officers were non-participants. He became an inspector-sergeant, eventually rising to head the SFPD Bureau of Inspectors. As a lieutenant, he headed the sniper unit.
“Fred Lau” enters the record as american police chief. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Fred, American and police can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5495333. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1996, 2002 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fred Lau” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.