[3] He graduated in 1956 from George Washington High School, where he played football, joined ROTC, and was president of the Eagle Service Society.
The day after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, Sanders – then on the robbery detail – solved the murder of a Muni driver in Hunters Point.
In 2002 Sanders and Hendrix were accused of misconduct during the 1989 murder arrest and conviction of two young African American men, colluding with prosecutors in suppressing a confession from another person.
[12][13] In 1973 the group filed a class-action discrimination lawsuit in federal court against SFPD, the City, and County of San Francisco, and the Civil Service Commission for their failure to recruit and hire minorities.
[16] The SFPD, under out-going chief Fred H. Lau, had been excoriated in the San Francisco Chronicle for poor results on major crime investigation,[17] so the appointment of Sanders seemed to address Brown's need.
[19] Three months after that, SF District Attorney Terence Hallinan indicted Sanders and nine other senior SFPD officers for obstructing justice in the investigation of that incident; the accused were arrested and placed on leave.
During 2003 and through 2004, most of the ten accused senior officers (including Chief Sanders) pursued legal appeals to clear their names of the underlying factual claims regarding the obstruction.
[22] During his recovery period, the 1989 murder convictions of John Tennison and Antoine Goff (on which Sanders and Hendrix were the investigators) were reversed for prosecution errors.