While on vacation, Robert T. Ironside, Chief of Detectives of the San Francisco Police Department, is shot by an assassin and paralyzed from the waist down when the bullet grazed his spinal column. Determined to continue his crusade against crime, he is appointed special consultant to the S.F.P.D. by Police Commissioner Randall and is assigned a team of agents, including two former assistants, Sgt. Ed Brown and Policewoman Eve Whitfield, and an ex-delinquent (Mark Sanger), who becomes his aide and bodyguard. The series relates Ironside's unrelenting battle against crime and corruption.