The Sniper - Mayor's Office
The police are under intense pressure from the media and the public to solve the case. A meeting is convened in the Mayor's office in City Hall (map) to review where the investigation stands.
Then ... The view from the Mayor's office seems, at first glance, to be the correct one - it looks across Civic Plaza to the corner of McAllister and Larkin Streets.
... and Now, this is the matching office view today, but it's not the mayor's office, which is room 200 in the center of the east side of city hall. Instead this office is room 208 on the same corridor but at the north end of the building. CitySleuth has concluded that the office scene was filmed in a studio using a photo view taken from room 208.
... from 1955 ... in this contemporaneous vintage photo taken from City Hall we see on the left the State Building on McAllister, on the right the building that is now the Asian Art Museum on Larkin and between them the Astor Hotel with the large billboard, all clearly visible in the mayor's view above. The tower in the distance is 100 McAllister, now occupied by the UC Law College.
Police psychiatrist James Kent (Richard Kiley) makes a plea to the administration to better understand and preemptively reach out to the mentally ill with psychiatric help instead of locking them up after the fact. His impassioned words fall on deaf ears.