According to his son Dominick, Tony Bouza saw oppressive state power first-hand while growing up on Spain’s Atlantic coast in the 1930s. His neighbor was imprisoned after being found using binoculars to see nearby Nazi German ships, he told his children.
Tony Bouza passed away on Monday in Bloomington, Indiana, at the age of 94. He had been residing there with his wife of 66 years, Erica Bouza, in a memory care facility.
He started working for the New York Police Department in the 1950s, rose through the ranks and became a maverick reformer. Frustrated, he decided to change careers in the middle of his career, moving to Minneapolis. There, he became the first well-known outsider to lead the department and challenge the labor union and the city’s long-standing position of authority in the police establishment.
Tony Bouza: Former Minneapolis Police Chief dies aged 94
Tony Bouza, a former police chief of Minneapolis, passed away. He had just turned 94. From 1980 through 1989, Bouza served as Minneapolis’ police chief. Prior to being invited to move to Minneapolis by the then-mayor Don Fraser, he began his career in New York where he worked as an officer for the NYPD for several decades. Chuck Wexler, a friend of Bouza’s, recalled the former police chief as an iconoclast who made Minneapolis famous for its cutting-edge policing practices.