by John Buntin
Strange may (or may not) have been an unpleasant person; however, she clearly understood something that the department’s white officers did not—namely, that a black woman in a car with a white man in south Los Angeles was likely to be seen as a prostitute. Insisting on driving herself to meetings in African American neighborhoods wasn’t standoffish; it was an attempt to avoid humiliation. Whatever her personality, Parker did not hesitate when her name came up on the sergeant eligibility list. That November, he made Strange the LAPD’s first female African American sergeant.
But those who hoped for further steps toward equality were disappointed. Parker did not change the department’s unstated policy of not placing black officers in positions of command over white officers. He also dismissed the idea that the LAPD had a race-relations problem. In a March 11, 1953, letter to a resident who had written Mayor Bowron to complain about police abuse, Parker presented a rebuttal noting that over the course of the year 1952, the LAPD had received 1,068 complaints. During that same period, his letter continued, the department had made “a minimum of 1,741,860 contacts.” In other words, .0006 of the officer contacts had resulted in complaints. Of those, “259 (or 24.3 percent) were substantiated and resulted in disciplinary action…. A total of 116 official reprimands were issued, 126 officers received a total of 1,453 days suspension…. Sixteen officers were terminated from the Department.” To Parker, the conclusion was clear: Police misconduct was exceedingly rare, and on those occasions where misconduct did occur, it was severely punished. The possibility that the department’s statistics might mislead—that complaints were discouraged, that communities of color might have become inured to behavior that would have generated waves of complaints in whiter, more affluent parts of town—was something Parker does not appear to have considered.
This represented a failure of imagination. Yet to his credit, when the facts were clear, Parker followed them to their logical conclusion. In mid-1953, Los Angeles lurched into an antigang hysteria after a group of young thugs robbed and killed a pedestrian downtown. “Rat Packs Attack,” screamed the newspapers; columnists demanded that the police department hit back, often in strikingly intemperate ways. (One newspaper editorial called on the department to prevent crime by using “clubs and mailed fists”—this less than two years after the “Bloody Christmas” beatings.) Much of the public anger had a decidedly anti-Hispanic tone. Parker would have none of it. In response to an inquiry from the grand jury, Parker calmly refused to treat a lone incident as a deadly trend.
“The local juvenile gang problem is not new to this community, but has its roots deep in the social and economic make-up of this area,” Parker wrote back to jury foreman Don Thompson. “The recent incidents which have unfortunately been so spectacularly reported have created a wave of hysteria, not a crime wave. Most ethnic groups at one time or another have had confused generations which physically displayed their resentment toward society. The best methods of integrating these groups into our society are well known. Those methods will solve the present problem, if citizens will continue to apply them.”
To Parker, race relations were first and foremost a technical problem. The appropriate response was to deploy skilled public relations officers, officers like one African American officer who had caught Parker’s attention—Officer Tom Bradley, the same Tom Bradley who would later become Los Angeles’s first African American mayor.
IN 1955, Tom Bradley was one of the LAPD’s most promising African American officers. His rise had been remarkable. Bradley’s parents were sharecroppers, Texas-born, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1924 with their seven-year-old son. Tom’s father, Lee Bradley, soon found a job as a porter for the Santa Fe railroad. His mother, Crenner, devoted herself to the education of their son, maneuvering Bradley into the Polytechnic high school, a predominantly white institution known for its excellent athletics and strong academics. Tall, handsome, and fast, Tom Bradley excelled at both. Upon graduating, he won a track scholarship to UCLA. But after meeting Ethel Arnold (a beauty whom the L.A. Tribune would later describe as “the community’s prettiest girl”), Bradley decided he wanted to get married. That meant he needed a job. So, during his junior year, Bradley decided to apply to become a police officer. His score on the civil service test was high, and in 1940, he joined the LAPD.
Bradley got the kind of assignments that black officers typically do—in his instance, a position in the Newton Division vice squad. His work there on a bookmaking case in 1950 caught Parker’s eye. So too did his efforts to promote the department in the local press. By the autumn of 1953, Bradley was writing a regular “Police-Eye View” column for the California Eagle. His articles were perfectly crafted to win Parker’s approval. An October 22, 1953, piece on the Police Commission described it, reverentially, as “one of the most powerful agencies of our government.” This was a favorite fiction of the chief; every informed observer of Los Angeles politics knew that the Police Commission was little more than a rubber stamp. Still, it was a useful stance when the department came under Political attack. Bradley also took on the department’s critics in print. A January 28, 1954, column addressed the volatile issue of residents being stopped and questioned by the police. Bradley defended the practice, noting that police officers often had information that motivated the stop. Such efforts endeared him to Chief Parker. In early 1955, Parker approved Bradley’s request to move to a new community relations unit. Bradley threw himself into the work with commendable zeal. In short order, he had become a member of more than 120 social, fraternal, and business groups.
Although Parker was impressed by Bradley’s work, his apologetics for Chief Parker and the department met with skepticism in much of the black community. “Instead of decent human relations based on mutual respect and a negation of false and arbitrary barriers, Parker gives us the 20th century antibiotic, public relations,” complained the editorial board of another African American newspaper, the Los Angeles Tribune, in early 1955.
African Americans were particularly upset by the police department’s failure to integrate the force more aggressively. In late 1955, fire department chief John Alderson was removed from office for his point-blank refusal to integrate the fire department. Tellingly, Parker seemed to view the attempt to integrate the fire department as a quasi-subversive campaign: Intelligence division officers were sent to observe city council sessions on the issue. But when the police were confronted with similar demands, Parker maintained that LAPD was—and long had been—integrated.
Civil rights leaders thought differently.
Critics of the department noted that 60 percent of the department’s 122 “active Negro personnel” were deployed to Newton and 77th Street Divisions, the two “black” divisions. Black officers were effectively excluded from other parts of the city and from many of the department’s most desirable assignments.
“The Police of Los Angeles fall just a stone’s throw short of being as Jim Crow as if the department were situated in the heart of Georgia, rather than California,” declared the Tribune, somewhat melodramatically, in a February 1955 editorial.*
Despite such sniping, Parker seemed to value the job Bradley was doing. In the fall of 1958, Chief Parker personally called Bradley’s home to inform him that he’d made lieutenant, only the third African American lieutenant in the history of the force.
But Bill Parker was not the trusting sort. After a series of negative articles about the department appeared in the L.A. Sentinel, Parker decided to take a closer look at the performance of his top community liaison officer, and so he instructed the intelligence division to put Bradley under observation. Daryl Gates was with the chief when the intelligence report came back.
“Parker told me the report said that Bradley, instead of talking the department up, was providing negative information to dissident groups, saying unfavorable things about Parker and the LAPD,” wrote Gates in his memoirs. “That changed Parker’s view of him just like that. Bradley, he fumed, was an absolute traitor to
the department.”
What was the nature of Bradley’s transgression? While the exact offense is unknown, a 1961 intelligence division report on Bradley’s appearance at a meeting sponsored by the ACLU at a private residence at 16916 San Fernando Road provides a flavor of his comments:
Mr. Bradley spoke first:—
He stated that he had worked for the City 21 years, had served on the Police Community Public Relations Unit, and had a first-hand view of Police Department/Citizen relations.
He reviewed conditions—starting back about 1947 after World War II and the Zoot Suiters, etcetera—and stated a very touchy situation was growing between the police officers and the citizens. In his opinion a lack of understanding brought about police hostilities. He stated new police candidates were given the physical and written tests and then interviewed by a psychiatrist from the University of California in Los Angeles. At the Academy recruits were treated about the same during their thirteen weeks of training. However, when the recruits left the Academy they were immediately segregated and the white officers began to get an air of superiority. Colored officers and white officers were not placed in the field as partners until about a year ago. Although, Department policy was to integrate, there was a difference between pronouncement and action, and over the years several mistakes were made and tolerated.
There seemed to be no way for line officers to communicate with top personnel concerning their grievances. The Negro officer was naturally disgusted and the white officer continued to feel more superior and better and thus bound to discriminate against the Negro in his work…. All in all, Mr. Bradley did not come right out and condemn the Department in the open manner that [ACLU board member] Mr. [Hugh] Manes and Mr. [Lloyd] Wright [past president of the ACLU] did, but his silence and very presence on the platform gave me and most of those present the impression that his view, and that of his two cohorts was the same.
These were remarkably mild and measured remarks, yet they, too, were processed as treacherous attacks. Clearly, Parker’s threshold for “absolute treachery” was low. As punishment, Parker immediately transferred Bradley to Wilshire Division, where he was made watch lieutenant for the graveyard shift.
But Parker’s efforts to punish Bradley came too late. Like Parker, Bradley had earned a law degree while on the force. As a member of the community relations detail, he had also had the chance to build a wealth of contacts—contacts he now utilized to launch himself into local politics. In 1959, Bradley joined the effort to elect a black representative to the city council. Although his chosen candidate, Eddie Atkinson, ultimately fell short (in part because of an L.A. Times story highlighting Atkinson’s ownership of a tavern and suggesting underworld ties), Bradley impressed everyone he met. Atkinson’s loss underscored one of Bradley’s great strengths: A black tavern keeper was vulnerable to innuendo. A black cop like Tom Bradley wouldn’t be.
PARKER saw things differently. Tom Bradley was now an enemy within—and not the only one. By the summer of 1959, one of Parker’s ostensible bosses, police commissioner Herbert Greenwood, had become dissatisfied with Parker too. Where his predecessor on the board had been courtly and deferential, Greenwood was assertive and sometimes sharp. Judge Williams’s earlier accusations about the department’s selective enforcement of gambling ordinances led Greenwood to demand some answers. He requested that the department provide him with the information on the number, rank, and assignment of black officers. (“It is a question I’m frequently asked and I should know the answers,” he explained to the Los Angeles Times.) According to Greenwood, Parker responded by going “into a rage, shouting that the only reason I wanted it was to attack him.” Frustrated, Greenwood turned to a political ally, film star-turned-councilwoman Rosalind Wyman. But when Wyman pressed for more racial statistics from the department, Parker counterattacked, alleging that Greenwood and Wyman’s request for information was nothing more than a personal smear campaign. Mayor Poulson and the four other members of the Police Commission rallied to Parker’s defense. Wyman backed down, and on June 18, 1959, Greenwood resigned, releasing a statement that cited the “unhealthy attitudes” of the people in authority. Although his letter of resignation didn’t cite Parker by name, his statements to the press left no doubt that the person he had in mind was the chief of police.
“We don’t tell him,” Greenwood said by way of explanation. “He tells us.”
And so the Police Commission’s sole African American member—the only member of the commission who routinely challenged the chief—stepped down. Mayor Poulson’s effort to check his chief was at an end. Parker’s power over the LAPD was now complete.
* The LAPD apparently encouraged the use of tough tactics in black neighborhoods as well. As Deputy Chief Thad Brown later told historian Gerald Woods, “You could send Negro officers to do tough jobs in the black belt, and there would be no beef.” (Woods, “The Progressives and the Police,” 460.)
* Parker was also buffeted from another direction—by demands that the police department do more to crack down on crime. In late 1957, the city council formally complained to the chief about “soaring” vice conditions in South-Central Los Angeles (as the area around Watts was coming to be described). Mayor Poulson weighed in as well, complaining that prostitution, bookmaking, and narcotics “flourished without apparent restraint” between 40th and 56th Streets on Central Avenue and Aaron Boulevard. Chief Parker replied, testily, that he’d be happy to clean up the area if city officials found funding to increase the size of the vice squad by 363 percent.
23
Disneyland
“[H]ave gangsters taken over the place that can destroy me?”
—Nikita Khrushchev
BILL PARKER had long conceived of the mission of the Los Angeles Police Department in lofty terms. Its task, Parker believed, was nothing less than preserving civilization itself. Organized crime was at the top of Parker’s agenda not simply because he feared that it might regain control of Los Angeles but also because he believed that it weakened American society at a critical junction in the struggle against Soviet Russia. The Communist Party was Parker’s ultimate adversary. The allegations of brutality, the complaints of discrimination, the calls for a civilian review board—to Parker, they were all part of Moscow’s proxy war on the LAPD. Usually, the hand of the party was hidden, but in September 1959, he got a chance to clash directly with his ultimate adversary, the general secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev.
Earlier that year, President Eisenhower had invited Khrushchev to visit the United States, and the Soviet leader had agreed to an eleven-day trip that would crisscross the United States. Along the way, the Soviet premier was scheduled to spend one day and one night in Los Angeles. The prospect of a Khrushchev visit to Los Angeles sparked mass panic, as if a communist takeover might be affected by the mere presence of the general secretary. A hysterical protest rally was held in the Rose Bowl. As the official entrusted with Khrushchev’s security, Parker was concerned. Two weeks before the visit, Parker called on the public to “support Eisenhower” in this “most difficult decision.” He advised Angelenos to receive Khrushchev in a “state of aloof detachment” and to carry on with normal daily activities. Privately, though, the LAPD was preparing for the most high-security foreign visitor in the city’s history. Officers would be stationed at critical locations along Khrushchev’s every route. The Soviet leader would be surrounded by an envelope of LAPD officers at all times. No unauthorized contact with American civilians would be permitted. But at the very last minute, something came up. As Khrushchev flew across the country on September 19, accompanied by U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge, the Soviet premier made a request: He would like to tour Disneyland.
The general secretary’s desire for a visit was understandable. Disneyland, which had opened in Anaheim in 1955, was one of the wonders of its age, a 160-acre, $17 million Xanadu replete with such dazzling attractions as Sleeping Beauty’s castle, the Jungleland riv
er safari ride (complete with a mechanized hippo that reared up under the boat), the Mount Matterhorn toboggan slide (with Swiss summiteers climbing the mountain), and a rocket ship that simulated a trip to the moon. With Disneyland, Walt Disney, the man whose drawings revolutionized animation, had transformed the Coney Island-style amusement park into something new, the theme park, that offered up fantasy, exoticism, and, most enticing of all, the future. Anaheim’s city manager had extended an invitation to the Soviet premier when his trip to the United States had first been announced, and Khrushchev had been interested. However, when Khrushchev’s advance security team went to Los Angeles to meet with Chief Parker and other local officials three weeks before his trip to the United States, the visit to Disneyland had been dropped. The fact that Khrushchev would be visiting on a Saturday posed major crowd-control problems, and his limited stay in Los Angeles meant that he would have had almost no time to enjoy the rides or see the sights. Unfortunately, this change of plans had apparently not been mentioned to Khrushchev himself. It now fell to his American hosts to deal with this request.
Khrushchev was greeted at the airport by Mayor Poulson, who delivered a terse welcome to the Soviet premier in a vacant corner of the airport. Soon thereafter, Khrushchev’s request to tour Disneyland reached Chief Parker. The LAPD was stretched thin. Some five hundred officers—more than 10 percent of the force—had already been dedicated to Khrushchev’s visit. Parker himself was personally commanding their operations. As the motorcade (accompanied by fifty motorcycle officers and two police helicopters) sped to Khrushchev’s first event, a luncheon at 20th Century Fox, Chief Parker’s car was hit by an errant tomato. The incident underscored the dangers Khrushchev faced in an unsecured environment. Parker decided to reject the premier’s request. The LAPD simply could not secure the thirty-mile route to Orange County, Parker reasoned, much less a theme park located outside its jurisdiction which was likely to have forty thousand visitors with no advance notice. Disneyland, said the chief, was off limits.
