Quinn Tamm

Quinn Tamm (August 10, 1910 – January 23, 1986) was an assistant director for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then later an influential executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). Tamm's older brother Edward Allen Tamm was also an FBI official and later a federal judge.

Early life Quinn Tamm was born on August 10, 1910, in Seattle, Washington

In 1961, Tamm resigned from the FBI, where he was assistant of its Laboratory Division. or 1962, By 1968, Time noted: Quinn Tamm, 58, is not a policeman at all, but he is one of the most influential voices for police reform in the country. He has been behind most of the chiefs' innovations and has been a prime mover in efforts to interest the colleges in crime and college men in crime fighting. A former assistant director of the FBI, Tamm became executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 1961, quickly turned it from a genial club into a highly expert organization that not only trains police administrators but, on request of city governments, studies individual departments. Its recommendations are rarely ignored. Since the I.A.C.P.'s jolting indictment of the Baltimore force in 1965, every top cop in the country has learned to judge his department in terms of not only what it has done to curb crime but, more importantly, what it should be doing to adjust to the problems of a fast-changing and impatient society.

In 1975, Tamm left the IACP and became a consulting expert on law enforcement. Tamm said: I think this question of indictment of FBI agents goes far beyond the agent and the small individual represented by the first indictment. In order to present my case, might I point out that I'm rather unique in the fact that I am speaking in defense of the FBI because of my previous relationship with J. Edgar Hoover, the Director, and the fact that I was the first person, probably, in this country to actively criticize and oppose J. Edgar Hoover for some of the things he was doing. But I have a great and tremendous respect for the FBI organization and the people in it. I think they are being singled out; I can't understand why, but I noticed that the Department of Justice on January the fourteenth offered all sorts of explanation as to why they had not prosecuted CIA for the same, identical reasons or crime that the FBI is now being accused of in the same period of time...I think it was a plausible reason years ago when Hoover was alive, but I do not think it's a plausible reason now. I think that the FBI is completely and totally under the control of the Attorney General and the Department of Justice. But that goes back to the point that the FBI agents who are now being accused of these crimes were doing them under order from the officials in the government. And the position taken by the Department of Justice in the CIA case was the fact that there was no firm program delineating the extent to which people could go in cases of national security or foreign threats; and for a variety of reasons of that type the Department decided not to prosecute CIA agents. And they said in part: "In such circumstances prosecution takes on an air of hypocrisy and may appear to be the sacrifice of a scapegoat, and to reach down into the middle of the echelon of the FBI and to ignore the upper echelon of government." And this goes into the White House, it goes into the Attorneys General, it goes into the Congress and the Senators.

Personal life and death Quinn married Ora Belle, a secretary in the FBI Identification Division; they had two children, one of whom is Thomas Tamm.

J. Edgar Hoover considered Tamm a personal threat to his law enforcement power and personally considered Tamm to be his third most hated enemy (after Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.).

Quinn Tamm died age 75 on January 23, 1986, in Washington, D.C. at Washington Suburban Hospital after suffering a heart attack.