by John Buntin
Nothing in Parker’s life had prepared him to relate to African Americans. When Parker’s paternal grandfather had first arrived in the Black Hills, Deadwood had been a polyglot mining camp, filled with adventurers from Wales to Nanjing, including a number of African Americans. But by the time Parker was born in 1905, that had changed. Deadwood’s Chinatown, once the largest between San Francisco and the Mississippi River, had vanished; even the Chinese cemetery had been emptied of its bodies. The raucous, polyglot mining camp had given way to George Hearst’s more organized Homestead Mining Company. Deadwood had become white.
The Los Angeles Parker moved to in 1922 had a similar complexion, albeit on a larger scale. Of its 520,000 residents, only about 15,000 were black. Most African American residents lived east of Main Street. The oldest black neighborhoods were near downtown, south of the rail yards along Central Avenue. By the 1920s, another sizable African American community had formed in nearby Watts. Most were drawn to the area by construction jobs building two major lines of Henry Huntington’s Pacific Electric streetcar system—the north-south line from downtown L.A. to Long Beach and an east-west line from Venice to Santa Ana. When the lines were completed, they simply stayed, creating a mixed black-Latino area known as Mudtown.
As the 1920s progressed, the influx of African Americans to the Watts area accelerated. In 1926, Watts was incorporated into Los Angeles, in part to prevent the emergence of an independent, majority-black city. Three years later, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of racially restrictive housing covenants designed to keep West Slauson Avenue white. African Americans were slowly being confined to the south-central area. The upside of this concentration was political power. Unlike African Americans in the Jim Crow South, black Angelenos were never denied the right to vote. As a result, as soon as the early 1920s, black voters were seen as an important voting bloc. A handful of black Political bosses soon emerged. Unfortunately, this was not a wholly positive development. These figures weren’t just ward bosses; they were also crime lords. Instead of improving Central Avenue, many used their clout to create zones of protected vice. Said one police officer in the 1930s, “I know the payoff men, I know the go-betweens; but what can I do when it’s sanctioned by the city’s politicians?”
The situation satisfied no one. Law-abiding residents felt ignored by the police. In turn, the police came to associate Central Avenue—and African Americans in general—with crime and vice. When politics demanded a crackdown, Central Avenue was an easy target. The result was a strained relationship between African American residents and the police.
As a policeman, Parker didn’t have much firsthand experience in dealing with black people. Only about 2 percent of the force was African American, a percentage that roughly reflected that of the population as a whole. Although he’d worked in the Central Division as a young policeman, his recollections of his early days as a patrolman seem largely devoid of black people. (In contrast, his stint as a sergeant in Hollenbeck in the early 1930s clearly did affect his perception of Latinos.) Had Los Angeles remained a city with only a small African American population, this might not have mattered much. But it did not. For at the same moment that Bill Parker was shipping out to join the U.S. Army, Los Angeles was becoming a major destination for African Americans.
The primary draw was jobs. The need to arm America’s forces in the Pacific had transformed Los Angeles into a major industrial center. But L.A. also seemed to offer blacks an escape from the Jim Crow South, at least at first glance. African Americans responded to this new opportunity by migrating west by the thousands. In 1941, the year before Bill Parker left Los Angeles to join the U.S. Army, Los Angeles’s African American population numbered approximately 70,000 residents. By the time he returned, Los Angeles had become a city with the largest African American population west of St. Louis, with an African American population of more than 125,000.
The city did not take this change particularly well. The torrent of countrified newcomers shocked black and white Angelenos alike and created serious problems for local authorities. The first and most acute problem was housing. There wasn’t any, particularly at a time when even middle-class African Americans couldn’t legally purchase a home in most of the Los Angeles basin. So the newcomers crowded into the only residential district that was available, Little Tokyo—the previous residents of which had been relocated to interior concentration camps up and down the coast. Soon, the area had a new name—Bronzeville. Little Tokyo had suddenly become Los Angeles’s most fearful slum. It also became a center of crime. The understaffed, wartime LAPD responded poorly, with the slap of the blackjack and the crack of the truncheon. Officers policed African American neighborhoods with a heavy hand. Respect was mandatory—for officers, not residents. White officers demanded to be addressed as “Sir”—or else. (Tales of black men who were beaten and booked for drunkenness after some perceived slight were a common feature of black papers like the California Eagle and the Los Angeles Sentinel.) Black officers were, by some accounts, even rougher. According to white veterans of the 77th Street Division, black residents often requested “white justice” out of fear of what black officers might mete out.*
African Americans weren’t the only minority group that often found itself at the receiving end of a policeman’s baton. In 1942, L.A. county sheriff’s deputies and the LAPD responded to the brutal murder of a twenty-two-year-old Latino farmworker at the Sleepy Lagoon reservoir by rounding up more than six hundred Latino youths. Many were severely beaten during their interrogations. After a flagrantly unfair trial (during which the counsel for the defense were denied the right to communicate freely with their clients), twelve of the youths were convicted of murder and another five of assault. The convictions were later overturned on appeal, and prosecutors declined to retry the case.
Los Angeles even experienced something very much like a pogrom. In the summer of 1943, a handful of Chicano youths got into a fight with a group of servicemen on shore leave who’d been messing with their girlfriends. Three days later, servicemen responded with a five-day rampage through downtown and East L.A., during which time hundreds of Chicano youths, particularly those wearing “zoot suits” (whose long coats and balloon pants were widely associated with gang activity) were brutally beaten by military servicemen while the LAPD stood by. The pogrom ended only when the military placed downtown Los Angeles off-limits to all military personnel. Not since the days of the “third degree” had Los Angeles experienced such naked brutality. By 1945, it was clear that culling recent hires who should never have joined the department in the first place and improving race relations would be major challenges. Parker recognized the first challenge but not the second. By the time he faced the latter, it was too late.
WHILE COHEN thumbed his nose at Bobby Kennedy, Chief Parker found himself facing his own judicial inquiry. In the spring of 1959, a Los Angeles municipal judge, David Williams, threw out gambling charges against twenty-five African Americans, on the grounds that “the vice squad enforced gambling ordinances in a discriminatory fashion.” When a resident wrote the judge to ask why he’d taken it upon himself to nullify the law, Judge Williams essentially accused the LAPD of racist law enforcement.
“I feel that when police officials instruct their subordinate officers to arrest only Negroes on a given charge, it will not be long before their newly-gained power will prompt them to enforce other statutes only against certain other groups,” wrote Williams. The recipient of this letter promptly forwarded this provocative response to Chief Parker, who immediately dashed off an angry note to the judge. (“I have no knowledge of any such instruction issued in this Department, either orally or in writing.”) Parker demanded that Williams defend himself.
Williams wrote back to say that he found it curious that Chief Parker thought he had the right to interject himself into someone else’s private correspondence. Williams then offered a defense for his decision. He noted that over the course of the three preceding years, the only cases
prosecutors had brought to him involved raids on Negro gambling games. The only white people he’d seen prosecuted on gambling charges were those swept up in raids on Negro areas. The LAPD’s citywide statistics told a similar story. During the years 1957 and 1958, police had arrested 12,000 blacks on gambling charges but only 1,200 whites. Were African Americans really responsible for 90 percent of the gambling in the city of Los Angeles? Williams thought not. He suggested that the city council’s police and fire committee look into why so few gambling arrests were made in “white” parts of town, such as the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, and West Los Angeles.
The spat soon went public. Parker rejoined that blacks made up 73 percent of nationwide gambling arrests (not including bookmaking). The LAPD’s arrest rate was slightly higher (around 82 percent) not because the department was more racist, he insisted, but rather because the department was dealing with unusually hardened criminals. At a meeting with the city council soon after Williams first made his remarks, Parker explained that “there are certain courts in certain states in the Deep South where people of a certain race who are accused of crimes of violence definitely can get probation if they go to California.”
The black press objected strongly to this explanation. On March 19, the California Eagle criticized Parker for “losing his head” over the controversy with Williams. While praising his abilities as an administrator, the paper’s editorial board concluded that the chief’s shortcomings outweighed his virtues and called on Parker to retire. Of course, nothing came of this request. The city council conducted a cursory investigation of Judge Williams’s allegations and then referred them to the Police Commission, which promptly dismissed them as “a personal attack.” And so yet another investigation was stillborn.
Street-level disrespect wasn’t the only thing contributing to police-minority tensions. So too did Chief Parker’s principled commitment to follow where the data led him.
One of Parker’s first priorities as chief of police had been to make the LAPD more efficient and more data driven. Parker’s goal was crime prevention. Like most departments, the LAPD relied on crime mapping (i.e., pins on maps) to track trends and deployed its forces accordingly.
“Every department worth its salt deploys field forces on the basis of crime experience,” explained Parker in a 1957 collection of speeches titled Parker on Policing. “Deployment is often heaviest in so-called minority sections of the city,” he continued. “The reason is statistical—it is a fact that certain racial groups, at present time, commit a disproportionate share of the total crime.”
Even in 1958 this was a sensitive assertion, and Parker was careful to attempt to defuse it. “[A] competent police administrator is fully aware of the multiple conditions which create this problem,” he continued. “There is no inherent physical or mental weakness in any racial stock which tends it toward crime.” (Indeed, Parker was fond of pointing out that racial classifications were nothing more then pseudoscience.) “But,” he went on, “and this is a ‘but’ which must be borne constantly in mind—the police field deployment is not social agency activity. In deploying to suppress crime, we are not interested in why a certain group tends toward crime, we are interested in maintaining order.”
The LAPD deployed its forces most heavily where crime was highest—in black neighborhoods. Newton Division, a crowded district of 4.8 square miles (with a population, in 1950, of 101,000 residents, most of them African Americans), was assigned 34 policemen per square mile. Hollenbeck Division, which patrolled Mexican American East L.A., had 14 patrolmen per square mile. In contrast, there were only 443 policemen assigned to the 259 square miles of the Hollywood, Wilshire, and Foothill Divisions, less than two policemen per square mile. The result of this deployment pattern was that black and Chicano residents of Los Angeles were far more likely to interact with the LAPD than were white residents of the city.
Anyone who’d spent a day on the streets of Newton Division realized that the LAPD maintained order in a certain way—with a heavy hand. In those days, most good beat officers were big, imposing men. Flagrant disrespect routinely resulted in a stiff dose of “street justice”—a bogus arrest, a painful jab with a baton, or worse. A greater police presence meant this happened more in African American parts of the city. It wasn’t necessarily a racial thing. Take a tough neighborhood, add thousands of newcomers who don’t know the ropes, apply police officers who believe that their personal safety depends on being tough, and you’ve got a recipe for trouble, regardless of the color of the people involved. But there were other reasons that the LAPD was particularly insistent on “respect.”
Police departments in cities with political machines such as New York and Chicago were big organizations padded with patronage jobs. Ward bosses often reserved civil service jobs for neighborhood supporters. Such forces frequently had problems with incompetency and corruption. But they also had advantages. Officers and neighborhood residents tended to know each other. Ward bosses and precinct or division captains generally worked hand in hand. And because the number of officers relative to the population being policed was often quite large, officers knew that if they got into a scrape, there were almost always other officers close at hand. The LAPD’s officers didn’t have that assurance. Backup was rarely around the block. Sometimes, it was miles away. As a result, when the LAPD acted, it went in hard and fast. It was a style of policing driven in part by fear. But all that many residents saw was cocky aggression.
This left a bitter taste in black neighborhoods. While the police demanded deference and respect, many of its officers seemed unable—or unwilling—to distinguish between actual hoodlums and ordinary citizens. It was one thing to get tough with a known criminal. It was quite another to repeatedly stop and insultingly question a law-abiding citizen. But for whatever reason, that is precisely what the LAPD too often did.
In the African American press, story after story chronicled the indignities. “EVERY NEGRO A SUSPECT,” screamed the California Eagle in a March 20, 1947, article on the police hunt for a pair of men who’d shot two police officers over the course of the preceding weekend. A shooting was, of course, a serious matter, but the police response was indiscriminate. “No Negro, no matter how little he fitted the description of the two fugitives, was immune from police search and question,” continued the paper bitterly. Every few months, the paper would carry a horrifying story about a black man—or a black woman—who had suffered insult, if not assault, at the hands of the police.
“With the death this week of Dan Jense, a cafe owner who was brutally beaten by police in the course of a raid on his establishment, the spotlight shifts to police brutality and brings into focus the repeated complaints which have come out of minority communities for the past several years,” wrote the Eagle in June 1949. But of course, the mainstream press didn’t shift its attention to police brutality. Neither did the city’s politicians. “Mayor Bowron has steadfastly defended the police in every reported incident of brutality,” the Eagle lamented.
“The cold-blooded killing of August Salcido and the fatal beating of Herman Burns, climaxed the uninhibited ‘legal lynching’ campaign of terror that the police department has been carrying on against Negroes and Mexicans for some time,” opined the paper on another occasion:
Delegation after delegation has appeared before the Mayor demanding that he put a stop to the unnecessary rousting, beating and intimidating of citizens in the minority community. Bowron has promised time and again, he would check these abuses, but they have continued and grown.
The steps the mayor had taken, the paper continued, such as appointing an African American to monitor allegations of brutality, were little more than “window-dressing.” With scandal again threatening the department’s leadership, the paper foresaw “token raids” to divert attention from the main action.
“Any so-called ‘clean-up’ on the East Side [meaning east of Main Street] would be in reality a cover-up for a campaign of intimidation and police terroris
m,” the paper heatedly concluded.
To nonblacks, such accounts were easy to dismiss. The outspoken publisher of the Eagle, Charlotta Bass, was, if not a Communist, then at the very least a fellow traveler. Moreover, police department investigations rarely substantiated these dramatic tales of wrongdoing. Indeed, some proved so frivolous that the police department began to urge prosecutors to charge people who brought unwarranted complaints against the department with making false statements about the police. Even black Angelenos were sometimes skeptical of the Eagle, preferring instead the more conservative Sentinel. But the Sentinel, too, was replete with stories of black men and women going about their business and running afoul of the police. To African Americans, the sheer accumulation of anecdotes was compelling. White residents rarely heard or read about these stories.
AS THE HEAD of internal affairs, Bill Parker might have been expected to take a stance on such issues, but there’s no evidence he did. Instead, Parker focused almost exclusively on corruption and the underworld. Yet there is reason to believe that Parker was initially seen as something of a progressive on race relations. The two commissioners who initially supported Parker for chief were Irving Snyder, who was Jewish, and Dr. J. Alexander Somerville, who was African American. Presumably, these men saw Parker as a fair-minded individual. The second reason for believing Parker would be fair-minded arose from his treatment of African American policewoman Vivian Strange.
When he was sworn in as chief, Parker made a striking promise to the rank and file: When it came to promotions, he would always pick the person at the top of the civil service eligibility list. The first test of this policy came almost immediately, when Strange became eligible to make sergeant, a rank that no African American woman had ever before attained. Strange was not popular in the department, where she had a reputation as someone who “hated” white people so much that she wouldn’t ride in the same car with them. Fifty years after her promotion to sergeant, one senior LAPD commander described her as “a bitch.”
