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Warden of the Ghetto: LAPD Chief William H. Parker

During its January 1960 hearing, the US Commission on Civil Rights tepidly attempted to open a window on the police abuse of minorities in Los Angeles. Chief William H. Parker, notorious for his explosive behavior under questioning, immediately slammed it shut: “There is no segregation or integration problem in this community, in my opinion, and I have been here since 1922.” But long-suffering Los Angeles, he testified, was being inundated by barely civilized poor people from other regions. He suspected that Southern states in particular were sending their thriftless unemployed westward. “I attended a conference of mayors,” he submitted, “in which I had certain mayors tell me flatly that they would pay fares for certain people to move them into Los Angeles.” The result? “The Negro [in Los Angeles] committed eleven times as many crimes as other races.” As for Mexicans, “some of those people [are] not too far removed from the wild tribes of the district of the inner mountains of Mexico. I don’t think you can throw the genes out of the question when you discuss behavior patterns of people.” But Parker did not totally discount a civil rights problem in Los Angeles: “I think the greatest dislocated minority in America today are the police … blamed for all the ills of humanity.” “There is no one,” he complained, “concerned about the civil rights of the policeman.”¹

When Councilman Edward Roybal voiced the outrage of the Eastside about the “wild tribes” remark, Parker denied that he had ever said it. His lie was exposed when a tape of the testimony was played to the city council, but the chief refused to apologize. Police critics, as he always reminded the public, were deliberately or ignorantly doing the laundry for gangsters and Communists.² In this controversy, as during every other during his seventeen-year tenure (1950–66), he could count on the city’s press (the Chandler family’s Times and Daily Mirror as well as the Hearst-owned Examiner [later Herald-Examiner]) to automatically editorialize in his support. Although his blood enemies ranged from J. Edgar Hoover to Governor Pat Brown, Parker was politically invulnerable thanks to lifetime tenure, a Hollywood publicity machine, and a blackmail bureau that rivaled Hoover’s.

Parker, who had earned a law degree while walking a beat, was adroit at conflating boss control of the police with civilian oversight. In 1934 he orchestrated, on behalf of the Fire and Police Protective League, a charter amendment that established a board of rights, composed of ranking LAPD officers, with exclusive jurisdiction over police misconduct. A subsequent amendment in 1937 gave chiefs life tenure and made it virtually impossible for the city to fire them. These were promoted as reforms that would once and for all remove political corruption from police administration. Joe Domanick, in his history of the LAPD, however, characterized the amendments as the equivalent of a coup d’etat: “A quasi-military organization had declared itself independent of the rest of city government and placed itself outside the control of the police commission, City Hall, or any other elected public officials, outside of the democratic system of checks and balances.”³

As chief, Parker liked to flaunt his power in the face of an impotent and captive police commission. Before the Second World War the LAPD, especially its infamous Red Squad, had been the military arm of the open shop, of Harry Chandler and the anti-union Merchants and Manufacturers Association. Parker changed the balance of power. He continued to feed the conservative Republican appetite for political intelligence on their enemies, but he seldom broke strikes and absolutely never took orders. He had his own expansive dark agenda as well as an independent and largely impregnable political base. He replaced boss rule with cop rule and used the police commission to rubber-stamp his authority.

In June 1959, Herbert Greenwood, a Black attorney appointed to the commission by Mayor Norris Poulson, resigned in disgust, telling reporters that Parker “runs the whole show.” He cited the example of Ed Washington, a spectator at a fight the year before who “was told to move along by an officer and apparently didn’t move fast enough … the officer applied a judo hold and broke the man’s neck.” When Washington’s death was brought before the commission, Parker testified that the death was an accident and that there was “no need to make an investigation.” Except for Greenwood, the commission dutifully accepted the chief’s word.⁴ But even sycophants were sometimes unsettled by the actual man behind the mask of Old Testament rectitude.

Parker was “Whisky Bill”: an “obnoxious, sloppy, sarcastic drunk,” who regularly relied on his driver, future LAPD chief Daryl Gates, to rescue him from disgraceful situations. According to Domanick,

He slurred his words, stumbled in and out of cars, and sometimes had to be literally carried home. Awkwardly prancing about shaking his arms doing a Sioux Indian dance he’d learned in his youth in South Dakota, or regularly throwing up after downing his pre-dinner bourbons in his house, among friends, was one thing. Showing up late, hung-over, and still drunk to review the Rose Parade with the mayor, and then giggling uncontrollably, quite another.⁵

But, like a movie star, he had a professional publicity bureau to safeguard his public image.

Dragnet had started as a radio show during the administration of Parker’s immediate predecessor, temporary chief William Worton (a Marine general with extensive experience in intelligence and espionage). Parker was initially wary of the show but also saw the opportunity to publicize his views on law and order. So when Jack Webb, the originator and star of the show, won network approval to produce both television and radio versions, Parker offered unlimited LAPD cooperation in production if Webb allowed the department’s Public Information Division (PID) to vet the scripts. Parker kept Webb on a short leash—forcing him, for instance, to never use the word “cop,” which the chief regarded as derogatory. In addition, adds Domanick, “the advisors closely examined the script to guarantee that the LAPD officers on Dragnet were ethical, efficient, terse and white.” It quickly became one of the top television programs of the 1950s and the template for a succession of television procedurals (twenty-five shows in all) and movies that exalted not only the LAPD macho ethos but also its icy and unnerving attitude toward the general citizenry.⁶

In addition to Hollywood, the PID—a unit of twenty permanent assigned officers—worked closely and often intimidatingly with the press: the Hearst-owned Examiner published an annual LAPD supplement lauding the chief and his men. Look magazine was persuaded to do a photo essay on the skirt-clad LAPD women, in which their marksmanship and homemaking abilities were equally stressed. There were even LAPD fashion shows. The PID also solicited articles on topics like the wonderful architecture of the LA Police Academy.⁷ Parker, who insisted on an above-average IQ as an admission requirement for the academy, also made good use of literary talent on the force. Just as he himself had been the speechwriter for Chief James Davis in the 1930s, he now made a young second-generation cop, Gene Roddenberry, his chief speechwriter and script consultant. In 1957 Roddenberry resigned to write full time for television, and legend claims that Chief Parker was the model for Star Trek’s Mr. Spock—half alien, half human, with no sense of humor.⁸

An FBI agent assigned to monitor and report on Parker’s activities once described him as “a psychopath in his desire for publicity.” Undoubtedly. But the chief was also shrewdly selling the need for the LAPD. In several speeches published in academic journals during the mid 1950s, Parker expounded a surprisingly pessimistic doctrine of law enforcement, emphasizing that crime moved in cycles determined by socioeconomic factors beyond the power of the police to control: “Lacking the ability to remedy human imperfection, we must learn to live with it. The only way to safely live with it is to control it. Control, not correction, is the key.” He added that “police field deployment is not social agency activity …[it] is concerned with effect, not cause.” The public, however, chronically underestimated the prevalence of crime and placed naïve belief in sociological solutions such as the probation and youth services agencies that Parker scorned. The result was an unwillingness to properly finance and support tough policing. Parker’s remedy was that police reformers must intervene in the “creation of a market for professional law enforcement.”⁹

Generating this demand meant using the media to show that crime lurked in every crevice of urban society and was only held at bay by a “thin blue line” of hard-as-nails cops. Police critics, if they so dared, would have to pass through a gauntlet of irrefutable crime statistics scientifically amassed by police analysts. (Parker’s belief in letting no crime, however trivial, go unpunished anticipated the contemporary “broken windows” school of policing.) What went unsaid, of course, was that the easiest way to generate politically dramatic indices of criminality was through the use of dragnets, racial profiling, random traffic stops, raids on gay bars, warrantless home break-ins, and the promotion of ordinary misdemeanors to felonies whenever possible. The relentless, virtually industrialized policing of the southern and eastern districts of the city, as well as gay Hollywood, automatically became its own self-justification. Mob invaders from the East and Red conspirators were just the frosting on Parker’s cake. White-collar crime, meanwhile, was scarcely acknowledged.

The Scalp Collection

Parker, like his archenemy J. Edgar Hoover, was also a master extortionist. He had learned the black arts during his three years as an administrative assistant to corrupt and brutal Chief James Davis, for whom, according to Domanick, “he gathered information on the professional and personal lives of elected and appointed officials and prominent citizens.”¹⁰ One ranking veteran of the Parker era said that his boss employed a “Soviet model of intelligence—to collect as much as possible about any number of suspicious individuals because commanders never knew when the information could be useful.”¹¹ One of his first acts in office was to expand the intelligence squad into a full division and later, in 1956, to establish a clearinghouse that shared with other law enforcement agencies the LAPD’s thousands of dossiers on subversives as well as mobsters, drug dealers and gamblers.¹² Carlton Williams, the Times’s city hall correspondent and chief hatchet man for the Chandlers in local politics, also had access to the files and frequently used them against his paper’s opponents.¹³

Parker bugged everything: the city jail, all LAPD phone calls, city council offices, the hotel rooms of candidates, and private residences.¹⁴ He also made the sledgehammer LAPD standard equipment. His men routinely raided homes and businesses without warrant, knocking down doors and smashing everything inside. In a 1955 case, People v. Cahan, California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor expressed amazement at Parker’s warrantless empire of surveillance and his force’s enthusiasm for the destruction of suspects’ property. Parker raged against having his “hands tied” by the ruling against the LAPD in this case, but he continued, if more clandestinely, his illegal surveillance of politicians and suspected criminals.¹⁵

His scalp collection was impressive. At the beginning of his tenure, he had put a silver stake through the heart of public housing by exposing, in a televised hearing, Frank Wilkinson, the public relations officer of the LA Housing Authority, as a supposed Communist.¹⁶ In 1957 he attempted to destroy the political career of a woman named Ethel Narvid who worked for liberal Valley council member (later congressmember) James Corman. Parker claimed he had evidence that she was a Communist, but Corman, who had the moral backbone missing in many other members of the council, ignored the chief and made her his deputy. The significance of this otherwise-obscure episode, Domanick argues, is that it was a “sign of how closely Bill Parker was monitoring and influencing local political affairs that he would invest himself trying to defeat a staff member of a freshman on a fifteen-member city council.”¹⁷

He stalked bigger game the following year, during one of the most important elections in state history. Challenging generations of Republican control over the governorship, Democrat Pat Brown was locked in a bitter contest with US Senator William Knowland, an archconservative who was also sponsoring a right-to-work amendment on the ballot. In Southern California, Democratic National Committee member Paul Ziffren was Brown’s crucial liaison with Hollywood moguls and Jewish political donors. Two years earlier, Ziffren had urged Brown, then attorney general, to investigate Parker’s intelligence division for its rampant disregard of constitutional rights.¹⁸ The LAPD’s revenge was to pass on to the Knowland camp—probably via the Times’ Carlton Williams—information that Ziffren, an entertainment lawyer originally from Chicago, was associated with mob members. In Parker’s universe, of course, this might simply entail knowing Frank Sinatra, whom Parker considered “totally tied to the Mafia.”¹⁹

But Brown and the Democrats swept the elections, taking control of both houses in Sacramento for the first time in a century, with a well-known enemy of Parker, LA Superior Court Judge Stanley Mosk, elected state attorney general. Mosk subsequently repulsed several attempts by Parker to repeal the Cahan decision and restore wiretapping on a broad scale. The chief spied on both Brown and Mosk, but the governor was beyond his reach. Mosk wasn’t. “In July 1963 detectives observed that Mosk boarded a plane for Mexico City with a twenty-three year old woman who was not his wife. Either one of the department’s detectives flew to Mexico or arranged with private detectives to set up a camera and focus it on the window of their hotel room.” In short order Mosk abandoned plans to run for the US Senate. Brown appointed him to the California Supreme Court as compensation.²⁰

Thanks to James Ellroy and other pulp writers, Chief Parker still rules postwar Los Angeles in the imagination. Indeed, he’s the only public figure from the 1950–66 period, aside from celebrity gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen, that anyone today is likely to know about. Yet an important and proud chapter in Parker’s biography remains obscure: his service during the Second World War as the designer of the Police and Prisons Plan for the Normandy invasion. Army Captain Parker subsequently accompanied Patton’s Third Army to Paris (earning a Purple Heart en route) and then helped denazify police forces in Germany, where he served under Orlando Wilson, another police reformer with an authoritarian style. (In 1960 Chicago Mayor Richard Daley appointed Wilson as the city’s superintendent of police.) Parker, in other words, had the exhilarating experiences of administering martial law and rebuilding police institutions from scratch. In his study of Black radicalism and the LAPD, historian Bruce Tylor suggests that martial law remained Parker’s favored paradigm, at least for policing South Central L.A.²¹

The LAPD not only enforced law within the ghetto; it enforced the ghetto itself. Glenn Souza, who graduated from the police academy in 1959, described the department as “completely segregated and by any definition extremely racist,” attesting, “Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and Chief William H. Parker was god.” Assigned to the University Division (south of USC), he was amazed at the scope of LAPD power over the Black community: “We were a mercenary army unofficially empowered to arrest anyone at any time for any cause.” One cause was violation of the unwritten curfew that excluded Black people from white residential districts after dark. Souza reminisced:

Black people could not venture north of Beverly or much west of La Brea after dark without a strongly documented purpose. In Hollywood Division, a Negro was an automatic “shake” or field interview with the resultant warrant check or match-up to some vague crime report. A favored location for these shakes was the call box at Outpost Canyon and Mulholland Drive. If there was absolutely no way to arrest the suspect, he was told to start walking.²²

Almena Loman, a community journalist and newspaper publisher, once summed up the universal experience of law-abiding Blacks in dealings with the LAPD: “They’re rude, overbearing, and they make the simple act of giving you a ticket an exercise in the deprival of your dignity and adulthood.”²³ In July 1960 the NAACP and the ACLU, with attorney Hugh Manes as spokesperson, backed Councilman Roybal’s efforts to revive an initiative from the 1940s to establish a civilian police review board.²⁴ Parker was infuriated by the proposal and unleashed his supporters. The vice president of the Police and Fire Protective League, Captain Ed Davis (a future LAPD chief, 1969–78), denounced it as “shocking” and “an opening wedge for machine politics,” while an angry letter to Roybal warned that his proposal would turn the City of Angels into the “City of Demons.”²⁵

Parker himself reserved a signature rant for a coroner’s jury in 1960 that found one of his men guilty of “criminal homicide” in the death of a 16-year-old Black high school student. “The same forces and philosophies backing the Castro regime in Cuba,” he warned, were behind the finding.²⁶ Meanwhile he simply ignored the charge made by Miller’s Eagle that the police protected the “Spook Hunters”—white gangs based in the industrial suburbs east of Alameda that also had affiliates in Inglewood and neighborhoods west of Vermont. “The Spooks,” said the paper, “lately have been going after junior high school kids, terrorizing Negro youngsters at Mt. Vernon, John Muir and John Adams junior highs. They’re not arrested, say the Negro teenagers.”²⁷

Bugging the Mayor

1961 was an election year, and Parker, universally acknowledged as the most powerful public official in the city, was serene in the certainty that Mayor Poulson, who had been hoisted into office in 1953 by the Times and the Committee of Twenty-Five, would be back for another term. There was no love lost between the chief and the mayor. In 1950 Parker had bugged Congressman Poulson’s hotel room while he was meeting with a lobbyist who later turned out to have left-wing sympathies, and the appliance that he gave Poulson as a gift soon became known as the “Red refrigerator.” As the “downtown mayor,” however, Poulson had learned to sing in the chief’s choir and never criticize him in public.²⁸ Neither took seriously the wild card candidacy of Sam Yorty, a washed-up former congressman who had moved from the far left of the Democratic Party to its extreme right. His current stock among Democrats was particularly low since he was supporting Nixon and had just published a pamphlet (I Cannot Take Kennedy) denouncing JFK for, among other things, his religion. Bookmakers put him barely in third place in a field of nine.

But Yorty retained a constituency among what Nathanael West and Edmund Wilson in the 1930s had denominated the “Folks,” the now-elderly Midwesterners who had flocked to Los Angeles in the early twentieth century and then politically oscillated between the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s and Upton Sinclair’s socialistic EPIC movement in the 1930s. Many were once again Republicans, but the mayoralty was nonpartisan, and Nebraska-born Yorty, although perhaps no William Jennings Bryan, was a persuasive, folksy speaker who could articulate liberal and conservative values in the same breath. He also enjoyed support from anti-communist AFL unions, who still considered him a labor candidate. Nonetheless, the addition of geriatric Iowans and trade union conservatives still left Yorty far behind Poulson, who enjoyed endorsements from establishment figures across the political spectrum as well as from all the major newspapers.

Yorty’s evolving strategy during the campaign was to build a broad coalition of city hall outsiders, with emphasis on three issues: ending trash separation (an issue that appealed to housewives), supporting an additional council seat for the Valley, and firing the police commission (it was widely believed that he intended to get rid of Parker as well).²⁹ Most of the Black elite continued to back Poulson, but Celes King, who had been one of the famous Tuskegee Airmen and now owned an important bail bond agency, came out for Yorty, as did a majority of rank-and-file Black voters.³⁰ On the Eastside he had ardent support from one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in the community, Dr. Francisco Bravo, the owner of health clinics and a bank. Parker meanwhile responded true to form: spying on the campaign and aiding Poulson with information about Sam’s alleged criminal connections.³¹ Then on Memorial Day, a carousel operator in Griffith Park accused a Black youth of boarding without a ticket; when the young man contested this, he was wrestled to the ground by white police officers and put into a squad car. A crowd of Black youth surrounded the car, liberated the suspect, and were soon scuffling with the police. One officer opened fire; the crowd replied with bottles. As LAPD reinforcements arrived with their sirens screaming, the teenagers shouted back: “This is not Alabama!” Black voters agreed and saw the election largely as a referendum on Parker.³²

Yorty’s victory was an equal shock to Downtown Republicans and Westside Democrats, introducing an unexpected element of populist instability into municipal politics. The Committee of Twenty-Five types were unsure of Yorty’s support for Bunker Hill redevelopment, and with Norman Chandler’s retirement a few months earlier (in favor of his son Otis), they no longer had a veteran general who could keep city hall in line. Westside Democrats, meanwhile, feared that Yorty’s popularity in the Valley could tip the 1962 gubernatorial election to Nixon. Although he would one day become Los Angeles’s equivalent to Alabama’s George Wallace, in the immediate aftermath of the election, Yorty remained true to his campaign promises to sack the police commission (most resigned) and restrain police abuse in minority communities. “I expect Parker,” the new mayor avowed, “to enforce the law and stop making remarks about minority groups. We’re not living in the South.”³³ He denounced the chief’s “Gestapolike” methods and appointed Herbert Greenwood, the former police commissioner and Parker foe, to the city housing authority.

But Yorty’s challenge to L.A.’s alpha wolf was short lived: by spring he was in lockstep with Parker’s war against the Black Muslims (the subject of the next chapter) and singing only praises of the chief and his policies. In February 1963 the mayor’s archfoe on the council, Karl Rundberg (Pacific Palisades), startled the members with the claim that he had been present when “Parker entered the mayor’s office with a briefcase. When Parker came out of that two-hour meeting, they have been sweethearts ever since. I’d like to get that file Parker has on him and make that public.” Rundberg believed that the dossier detailed Yorty’s hidden stake in the rubbish business, but others were convinced it contained an account of “assignations with women on Sunset Boulevard.”³⁴

In a cool note to the council, Parker dismissed the story and began planning a suitable revenge against Rundberg. That summer Bill Stout, a local TV commentator who often substituted for Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News, broadcast accusations that Rundberg in his earlier career in St. Louis had passed bad checks and represented corrupt stock manipulators. Stout said that he had received the information from a community group advocating Rundberg’s recall; the councilman countered that it had actually come from Yorty and his éminence grise, executive assistant Robert Coe.³⁵ It’s not hard to figure out where they got it.