In 1966, under a new state law, HUPD officers became the first department in the state to be granted “special state police” status as campus officers, greatly expanding their authority and powers of arrest.

Moving beyond the traditional patrolling, officers began asking trespassers for identification, making arrests, conducting investigations into campus thefts, and supporting other local law enforcement agencies.

The campus unrest of the late 1960s tested Tonis and his newly professionalized department to their limits.

Numerous times HUPD officers helped quell riots in Harvard Square, and carefully policed protests in the Yard.

When pro-segregation Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace spoke in Sanders Theatre in 1968 and protesting Harvard students surrounded the building, Tonis was forced to fall back on his knowledge of the same steam tunnels that had allowed the Nazi spy to elude him in 1939.

Tonis snuck Wallace and his frightened bodyguards out of Memorial Hall through the tunnels and into the Yard where the governor made a hasty exit from campus.

Perhaps the defining moment of the new era in campus policing came on April 9, 1969, when students occupied University Hall and forcibly ejected the deans from the building.

Tonis opposed the plan of then-University President Nathan M. Pusey ’28 to order in nearly 400 state and local police to bust the occupation, remarking, “As far as the University police are concerned, we didn’t want to do anything about it, but they’re way over our heads now,” Tonis said at the time.

Following the bloody bust the next morning in which 250 students were arrested and more than 75 injured, Tonis, near tears, circulated among the traumatized protesters in the Yard apologizing for the violence and urging the students not to retaliate.

Throughout the turbulent 1960s and the early 1970s, as HUPD struggled with accusations of racial discrimination, Tonis worked to integrate the all-white police force.

As part of his efforts to achieve greater diversity on the force, in November 1974, Tonis hired Joan White, a former social worker, as HUPD’s first female officer in the seventy-five-person force. He described the new officer as “confident, pleasant, [and] attractive.”

The Renaissance Cop

Throughout the trying era he oversaw HUPD, Tonis always remained good-natured about the unique challenges posed by serving a college campus.

Tonis’ quiet and steadfast leadership through “the troubles” on campus earned him the enduring respect of both students and faculty.

“He always seemed stern, but he really wasn’t,” Sullivan says.