In Cleveland his firing sparked a recall drive to remove Kucinich from office. New York State The Governor of the State of New York then invited Hongisto to manage that state's prison system. Hongisto accepted the challenge of reforming a system that had been plagued by riots and unrest within several of its facilities. Permanent appointment to this position required confirmation by the state senate, which was not forthcoming. Hongisto therefore returned to San Francisco to run for supervisor in 1980. Return to San Francisco Upon his return to San Francisco, Hongisto was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, where he helped to place Proposition M, a measure which would limit construction of high rise commercial buildings, on the public ballot. The measure passed overwhelmingly, and has to this day continued to impact the development of San Francisco's skyline. With the endorsement of then-Mayor Art Agnos, Hongisto later ran for the office of Assessor. In 1991, he ran for mayor but did not make the run-off, coming in fourth. After declining to endorse Agnos for re-election as mayor, in a race won by police chief Frank Jordan, Hongisto was appointed in 1992 by Jordan to be San Francisco's police chief. Hongisto's tenure as police chief lasted only six weeks, and was punctuated by controversy over his handling of demonstrations and riots which occurred in the wake of the Rodney King police brutality trial in Los Angeles. Hongisto cordoned off an entire neighborhood in the Mission district on a Saturday afternoon, establishing a net that saw the arrests of all people on the street, demonstrators and ordinary citizens alike. Hongisto had rented city buses to transport the arrested citizens, and they were processed at a warehouse on San Francisco's wharfs. Instead of merely citing and releasing those arrested, Hongisto ordered that they be arrested and processed at the Santa Rita jail in Dublin (Alameda County), rather than in San Francisco County, thus ensuring that they would not be able to avail themselves of their civil rights and return to San Francisco. This enraged progressive activists and civil libertarians as well as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which ordered Hongisto to release the citizens he had arrested. On the following Saturday, Hongisto ordered police to disrupt another demonstration and arrested demonstrators with no order to disperse. Both incidences were later the targets of class action suits against the city