L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City

by John Buntin

  On the evening of August 11, Gates was heading over to check on security at the Harvey Aluminum Company plant at 190th and Normandie, where workers were out on strike. Over the radio he heard a dispatcher alerting all units to “a major 415”—a large-scale civil disturbance. Gates was about a mile from the intersection of Avalon and 116th Street. He decided to drive over and see what was going on.

  What he saw was mayhem. “A kind of crazed carnival atmosphere had broken out,” Gates recalled later in his memoirs. “Laughing, shouting, hurling anything they could find, people were running helter-skelter through the streets. Cars—ours and those of unsuspecting motorists—were pelted with rocks and bottles.” But, as Gates noted, “no single mob had formed.” Moreover, most of the violence was confined to an eight-block area that centered on the scene of the Frye arrest. There was still a chance to control the chaos.

  The police had regrouped at a gas station just off the Imperial Highway, where an ad hoc command post had been set up. As the ranking officer, Gates took charge of the field office. Using the roughly twenty patrol cars on hand, Gates attempted to cordon off the area. It was seventy police officers against a mob of five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand—no one really knew for sure. That wasn’t counting reporters, whose presence seemed to spur the youths to additional acts of violence. Nonetheless, by the early hours of the morning it appeared that the police had managed to contain the violence. By 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning, the rock-throwing had died down and the streets had largely cleared. Deputy Chief Murdock, with whom Gates had been in communication all evening, gave the order for the exhausted police officers to retire.

  LOS ANGELES was not having a race riot.

  If officers on the street were attuned to the possibility of spontaneous racial violence, Chief Parker was not. Even as the violence spread, Parker told a Los Angeles Times reporter that the city was not experiencing a race riot—where blacks attacked whites—“since all the rioters were Negroes.” Rather, what Los Angeles was witnessing was an outburst of childish emotionalism—“people who gave vent to their emotions on a hot night when the temperature didn’t get below 72 degrees.”

  In fact, Parker’s police department had been caught off guard—despite ample warnings. Earlier that summer, for instance, Chief Parker received a letter from B. J. Smith, director of the Research Analysis Corporation in McLean, Virginia. Smith noted that Rochester, Philadelphia, New York, and Newark had all experienced race riots during the summer of 1964. How was the country’s greatest police department preparing for the possibility of urban violence? Smith’s questions were timely: “What are the signs or indications of impending civil disturbance? What measures can be taken to avert this trouble? What techniques are most effective for controlling and discrediting demonstrations and riots?”

  Chief Parker’s response, in a letter written on May 12, was telling. “The Los Angeles Police Department has never experienced an insurgency situation,” he replied. Moreover, it never expected to. “There have been no occurrences of civil disturbances nor serious conditions which might initiate such a situation in this city.” He concluded the letter by referring Smith to cities that had.

  It was a curious response. Parker’s apocalyptic imagination was well developed. Just a few weeks after receiving Smith’s letter, for instance, Parker sat down for a radio interview with ultra-right-wing radio host Dean Man-ion. The tone of their conversation was dark. Parker told his listeners that America was in the midst of a slow-motion socialist revolution: “The difficulty encountered in this socialistic trend is that it is a revolution and it is not entirely a bloodless one, I assure you.” Yet somehow the prophet of social anarchy seemed unwilling to accept the possibility that anarchy might erupt in his own city, even after it already had.

  THURSDAY MORNING dawned uneasy. The violence had stopped, but no one knew what would happen that night. Eager to defuse the tensions, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Committee scheduled a 2 p.m. community meeting at Athens Park, eleven blocks from the scene of the rioting. Community leaders from across Watts and, indeed, the city appeared—before a huge throng of print, television, and radio reporters—to urge the residents of Watts not to resort to violence. The meeting started well. Even the combative Mrs. Frye urged residents “to help me and the others calm this situation down so that we will not have a riot tonight.” But as the event continued, a different mood swept through the crowd. Appeals to calm gave way to expressions of grievance. In a moment of confusion, an African American high school student dashed up to the microphones and informed the crowd that black youths would attack the white areas adjacent to Watts that evening. His remarks were widely carried by the media.

  Chief Parker did not attend the meeting. Nor would he agree to meet with those whom he dismissively called the “so-called” Negro leaders, who he believed were attempting to “relieve the Negro people of any responsibility in this situation.” Instead, the chief spoke to the press. His comments were not helpful. When asked about the causes of the unrest, Parker replied that the trouble started “when one person threw a rock, and like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.” Calls by assemblyman Mervyn Dymally to announce the immediate establishment of a civilian police review board were dismissed as “a vicious canard.” Parker believed it was now time to meet force with force. After being briefed on what had transpired at the Athens Park meeting, Parker called the adjutant general of the California National Guard to inform him that Los Angeles might well need the Guard. But calling out the Guard was something that only the governor could do and Governor Brown was in Greece on a trip. As a result, the authority to call out the Guard rested with Lt. Gov. Glenn Anderson, who was in Santa Barbara. That evening, Parker called Anderson to brief him on the situation. The lieutenant governor decided to drive back to his house in Los Angeles that evening so he could assess the situation for himself.

  At roughly the same time, a delegation of African American activists was meeting with deputy chief Roger Murdock. The activists wanted no visible police presence in Watts that evening. They believed the sight of police would only spur further violence. Instead, they asked the department to deploy only black officers—in civilian clothes and unmarked cars.

  Deputy Chief Murdock rejected this proposal out of hand. All day long, he, Daryl Gates, and Inspectors John Powers and Pete Hagan had been working to craft a plan to control South-Central Los Angeles. Their strategy was to deploy units from across the city—as well as roughly 150 deputy sheriffs from the 77th Street station. The hope was that the heavy presence of officers on the street would deter the rioters. Gates would deploy with a contingent of officers to the north of the Imperial Freeway; Inspector John Powers would come in from the south.

  THE EVENING began uneventfully—so much so that Gates and the other inspectors decided to treat themselves to a celebratory dinner. But when Gates arrived at the center of field operations, it was clear that things were going badly, even worse than the night before.

  The LAPD’s training in riot control had taught officers how to handle large groups of people—a mass protest heading down the street. The police mass in formation, split the rioters into two, and disperse them down two different streets. That, at least, was what the training manuals said. But this was different. There was no mass of marchers or rioters to confront. Instead, it was guerrilla warfare. Shots were being fired, Molotov cocktails thrown. Assailants disappeared down alleys and over fences seconds after they appeared. All around, windows and storefronts were being smashed and stores looted. Buildings were starting to go up in flames. Gates realized with horror that the LAPD’s field deployment was “a complete abject failure.” Confronted with tactics they had never imagined, much less trained against, the LAPD was adrift.

  Orders from headquarters that came over the squawking radios only added to the problem. While the burden of directing the department’s overall response had fallen primarily on Deputy Chief Murdock, Chief Parker was also taking a role in directi
ng the department’s response. Unfortunately, it was not a particularly helpful one. On the first night of the riots, Gates recalls Chief Parker “barking out orders on the radio.”

  “Get everyone out of their cars! Everybody out of their cars.”

  Eventually, Gates turned the radio off.

  Around midnight, the comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory suddenly appeared at Gates’s command post. He wanted to address the rioters. Initially Gates refused to provide a bullhorn or an accompaniment of officers, but he was overruled. So Gregory went out—and was promptly shot in the leg. His quick-witted reply: “All right, goddamn it. You shot me. Now go home.”

  They didn’t. By 4 a.m., some one hundred people had been injured and stores up and down Avalon had been looted and burned. Yet once again, the police were optimistic. Gates “sensed that the worst was over” and reported that the situation was “under control.” Other senior officers echoed this sentiment. When a member of Lieutenant Governor Anderson’s staff called the department’s emergency control center early Friday morning to get an update, the sergeant on duty told him that “the situation was well in hand.” Reassured, Anderson left Los Angeles at 7:25 a.m. Friday morning for Berkeley, where he was scheduled to attend a meeting as a member of the finance committee of the university’s board of regents.

  Half an hour later, the looting resumed. Rioters no longer felt they had to wait for the cover of night to act. By 9 a.m. looters were emptying the commercial sections of Watts along 103rd Street and north on Central Avenue. Chief Parker spoke with Mayor Yorty soon thereafter. Both men agreed that it was time to call in the Guard. Yet oddly, Mayor Yorty then left Los Angeles for a previously scheduled speaking arrangement in San Francisco.

  At 9:45 a.m., Parker convened an emergency staff meeting to discuss the situation. A liaison for the National Guard was present. In the course of the meeting, Chief Parker indicated that he expected the department would need one thousand Guardsmen to restore order. Yet not until 10:50 a.m. did Parker call Governor Brown’s executive secretary to formally request the Guard. But Governor Brown was still in Greece. The person who did have the authority to call out the Guard was Lieutenant Governor Anderson, and Anderson was unreachable, in transit to Berkeley.

  Speed was of the essence. By midmorning, police estimates put the size of the mob rampaging through the commercial section of Watts at three thousand. Ambulance drivers and firefighters were refusing to enter the area without armed escorts, escorts the undermanned LAPD could not provide. At that very moment, the 850-man strong Third Brigade of the National Guard was marshaling twelve miles away in Long Beach, in preparation for a weekend of training exercises at Camp Roberts near Santa Barbara. The brigade was fully armed and could have deployed to Watts in an hour’s time. If the Third Brigade proceeded on to Santa Barbara instead, they would be two and a half hours away from the city.

  At 11 a.m., Governor Brown’s executive secretary finally reached Lieutenant Governor Anderson in Berkeley and relayed Chief Parker’s request for the Guard. Still Anderson hesitated. He did not trust Bill Parker. Instead of acting on the chief’s request or contacting National Guard officers in Los Angeles for an independent assessment of the situation, Anderson decided that he would return to Los Angeles to see the situation for himself. A National Guard plane was dispatched to Oakland to pick him up. From there he flew to Sacramento for a further round of consultations with state Guard officials. At 1:35 p.m., he left for Los Angeles. By the time he arrived at 3:30, rioters were turning their attention to burning the buildings they had emptied out. Sniper fire kept away the fire trucks. By now, the police had ceded the neighborhood to the mob. Photographs show officers watching while looters stroll out of stores carrying new appliances.

  But Parker’s police weren’t worried about public relations. The looting had drifted north, to Broadway. By late afternoon, it was clear that the rioting threatened the downtown area if not the city as a whole.

  That’s when Chief Parker left for the weekend.

  The LAPD had a policy. Every weekend on a rotating basis, one of the deputy chiefs took over as the duty chief, with primary responsibility for running the department. That weekend, duty chief responsibility fell to deputy chief Harold Sullivan, who commanded the traffic division. With uncontained rioting threatening the central city, this might have seemed like a bad weekend to shift responsibility for running the department to one of the deputy chiefs. But Bill Parker was by then a sick man. The job had aged him—ravaged him really. And on the afternoon of Friday, August 13, as a large swath of his city was going up in flames, Chief Parker felt bad. When Sullivan went to Parker and asked the chief what he wanted to do about the weekend, he replied, “You take care of things.” Then Bill Parker went home.

  The LAPD was now Harold Sullivan’s to command.

  Sullivan was a traffic guy. He thought in terms of freeways, and he understood how they bifurcated the city in terms of race and class. Two were particularly important. The first was the Harbor Freeway. Built during the 1950s to connect downtown Los Angeles to the port at San Pedro, the Harbor Freeway sliced through the westernmost edge of the African American neighborhoods of Watts. To the west of the Harbor Freeway was the more affluent (and whiter) neighborhood of Crenshaw, as well as (farther north) the cynosure of Los Angeles’s gilded youth, the exclusive University of Southern California. To the east was the ghetto. As a result, living west of the 110 soon became a highly desirable goal—and a sign of success—for African American Angelenos.

  The other important freeway was the Santa Monica Freeway (then an unnamed spur of interstate 110), which ran west from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica. As a socioeconomic barrrier, “the 10” was even more significant. To the north lay Los Angeles’s most affluent neighborhoods and municipalities—Hancock Park, Beverly Hills, Brentwood. These were the homes of the white elite. South of the 10 was the city of the working class. Sullivan recognized that the freeway was not just a class or racial barrier. It was also a massive concrete wall. The Harbor Freeway was indefensible, punctuated as it was by dozens of over-and underpasses. The Santa Monica Freeway was different. Sullivan quickly calculated that between downtown and Beverly Hills, only a small number of underpasses connected south Los Angeles to the affluent neighborhoods to the north. He dispatched a contingent of reserve traffic officers to those critical underpasses, with firm instructions to seal them off and let no one through. California Highway Patrol officers soon arrived, to reinforce the blockades. The rich northern part of the city was now safe. As for Watts and Central Avenue, until the National Guard arrived, there was nothing authorities felt they could do. They were left to burn.

  Soon after arriving in Los Angeles, Lieutenant Governor Anderson spoke to Hale Champion, the state finance director back in Sacramento. Champion was aghast at what was unfolding. Moreover, he had gotten through to Governor Brown in Athens. Brown felt the Guard should be called out at once and that the possibility of a citywide curfew should be seriously considered. He also told Champion that he was flying back to California immediately. Spurred by this piece of news, Anderson finally decided to call out the Guard. At four o’clock, he announced the decision to the press. An hour later, he finally signed the proclamation. By six, 1,300 guardsmen had assembled in the local armories. By seven, they were en route to two local staging areas. Yet not until 10 p.m. would the first Guardsmen actually be deployed.

  Remarkably, no one had died during the first two days of rioting in Watts. That changed Friday night. Sometime between six and seven, the first resident of Watts died, an African American caught in the crossfire between police and looters. He would not be the last.

  Friday night brought something no American city had ever seen before: a full-scale urban war, one in which firemen and ambulances were fair game. Snipers repeatedly opened fire on the hundred-odd engine companies that were fighting fires in the area. That night, a fireman was crushed and killed by a falling wall. As the shooting intensified, the
dying began. At six thirty, twenty-one-year-old Leon Watson was gunned down, standing outside a barbershop. Two hours later, a deputy sheriff was fatally shot with his own gun while struggling with three suspects. The killing came quickly now. One hour later an unarmed Watts resident was killed by police outside a liquor store. Three unarmed companions were wounded. The next civilian died three minutes later. The next, two minutes after that. And so it went. The streets of Watts were washed with blood.

  Desperate to restore order, police officers and sheriff’s department deputies joined with more than a thousand Guardsmen, on foot, to sweep the streets. By 3 a.m., some 3,300 Guardsmen had been deployed. Yet still the violence raged. Throughout the night, hundreds of reports of snipers firing on the police were called into the 77th Street station. Not until the following evening, when Lieutenant Governor Anderson imposed an eight o’clock curfew on a forty-six-square-mile area of South Los Angeles and more than 13,000 National Guardsmen had deployed, was order restored. That Sunday, Chief Parker reappeared on the airwaves. His presence was not helpful. An attempt to assert that authorities had regained control—“Now we’re on top and they’re on the bottom”—was misinterpreted by many as an endorsement of white supremacy. Not until Tuesday morning was the curfew lifted. More than a thousand people had been wounded and treated in area hospitals. Thirty-four people had died during the rioting. Nearly four thousand people had been arrested. Six hundred buildings had been damaged by looting and fire, primarily grocery stores, liquor stores, furniture shops, clothing stores, and pawnshops (which seem to have been targeted primarily as repositories for guns). Some 261 buildings were totally destroyed. But as the fires died down, a new conflict flared up. At issue was the question of who was to blame.