Pomerleau was born on a ranch near Medicine Lake, Montana, with an unusual western, rural upbringing for a future big-city police supervisor.
In 1942, after World War II began, he re-enlisted and served in the Military Police Corps of the United States Army.
[4] To improve the Department and try to prevent future racial rioting, Maryland's 54th Governor, J. Millard Tawes, (1894-1979), [served 1959-1967], an Eastern Shore Democrat, whose Office had for a century, since before the American Civil War, held the power to appoint Baltimore City's Commissioner of Police.
Although it seemed that the new Commissioner came with a relatively liberal attitude toward race relations, urban poverty, and crime and many observers feel that he gradually turned more conservative and even autocratic as his tenure wore on, so that by the time of the Republican presidency of Richard M. Nixon in the 1970s, Pomerleau's attitudes and policies had come to resemble those of Nixon's "silent majority" rather than those that Governor Tawes and Mayor McKeldin expected.
[5] The new police commissioner moved to the city and lived in the southern lower neighborhood of Roland Park in North Baltimore.
His first budget proposal included higher salaries and bigger pensions for patrolmen/officers, new vehicles (with a re-designed "friendlier" blue and white paint scheme, to replace the long-time traditional "black and whites"), setting up of an analysis center, additional money for recruitment, and a school for continuous training of officers, following up on the police academy.
[7] Immediately after his appointment, Pomerleau created the "Inspectional Services Division" (ISD), an agency responsible for "active surveillance of individuals or groups outside the normal criminal behavior".
[21] The creation of the company—and its immediate endorsement and announcement of a no-bid contract by Mayor Schaefer—provoked an outcry from Baltimoreans, who called it expensive and unaccountable and feared that it would be favored over some of the city's preexisting black-owned firms.
[22] The City Council, in late 1981, led by President Walter Orlinsky, accused Pomerleau and Schaefer of attempting to establish a "shadow government".
This was the beginning of a 30-year controversy involving the use of a massive "slush fund" treasury, issuance of city-backed bonds for various "civic improvement" and commercial/residential "urban renewal" by a newly created public-private agency, the Baltimore Development Corporation and its powerful Trustees, which continued the major re-development of the "Inner Harbor" area where previous city agencies from the 1950s to 1970s left off, and soon expanded its reach and influence among its projects throughout the city.
It even became a matter for local humor as one time at an event, Mayor William Donald Schaefer, showed up with a long black cape draped and curled around his body and arm, topped by a black slouch fedora hat of the 1940s detective-style novels and cartoons or the old prime-time radio drama "The Shadow" with character "Lamont Cranston".