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

At first, Poulson sympathized with those who railed against Parker’s “secret police.” But after getting a firsthand look at the underworld, he was more understanding of police tactics. His own experiences had left him with no doubt that the underworld was actively attempting to regain control of Los Angeles. Nonetheless, Parker’s black-hat operations were disturbing. No target was off limits. Indeed, soon after Parker took office, conservative councilman Ed Davenport was enraged to find two policemen hiding in a closet listening in on a meeting Davenport was having with some businessmen constituents. Local politicians saw the unit as Parker’s Praetorian guard. So did Parker himself. In a letter to a priest who had written to request details about the unit, Parker openly explained that one of the division’s missions was to protect the chief from political attack. In addition to “exceptional traits of characters,” Parker wrote that officers who hoped to be assigned to intelligence had to be “trustworthy to the Office of the Chief of Police.” The reason Parker provided for this extraordinary requirement was an interesting one: “While such loyalty to the Office might be interpreted by some to be of a personal nature”—as indeed it clearly was—“we believe such loyalty to be to the integrity of the department.” Loyalty to Parker had become tantamount to police integrity.

Then there were the intelligence division files. The division maintained an alphabetical master card file “on all persons who have been brought to our attention.” The protocol was precise: 5 × 8 card with name, physical description, photo, address, phone number, description and license of car, friends, activities, and associations. These cards were then cross-indexed with the general criminal files. Fed by the intelligence division’s investigations and by a clipping service that monitored twenty newspapers across the country, the files grew quickly. How quickly was a closely held secret. No judge could subpoena these files. No Police Commission could review them, for, in another extraordinary decision, Chief Parker had ruled that these were not actually official police files. Rather, they were the personal property of the chief of police.

The potential for the abuse of power was obvious—indeed, Poulson himself had experienced it during his mayoral campaign. Yet far from expressing contrition, Chief Parker seemed to take pleasure in dropping hints about just how much he knew. “In my conversations with him,” Poulson would later recall, “he would inadvertently tell what he knew about this person or that…. I later found out that Chief Parker had a file on MANY PEOPLE and not all communist suspects.” Indeed, Parker continued to keep Poulson under surveillance, even after he became mayor. In most cities, this alone would have been a firing offense. But Parker was protected by several formidable defenses. The first was the legal defenses he had drafted in the thirties. As the liberal Daily News noted, Parker’s 1930s reforms meant that the Police Commission “can’t hire unless there is a vacancy and it can’t create a vacancy unless there is grave cause and then only after a hearing.” The second was his department’s growing reputation as—in policing expert O. W. Wilson’s constantly cited phrase—“the county’s best big city police department.” Just weeks before the Poulson-Bowron runoff election, the Governor’s Commission on Organized Crime had issued a report praising the LAPD for its success in keeping eastern gangsters out. (It warned that they were resettling in Palm Springs instead.) Tangling with a chief whose work was garnering such accolades carried big political risks.

There was a third reason to keep Parker in office as well: fear. Los Angeles was rife with rumors that gamblers and racketeers had already “cut the town up.” Poulson knew from personal experience that these rumors had some basis in fact. Firing Chief Parker would have been tantamount to inviting the underworld interests who had so frightened the mayor during his campaign to open shop in Los Angeles. Poulson viewed Parker as an admirable law enforcement officer but a “cold-blooded, self-centered individual.” Ultimately, though, Poulson feared the Mob more than his chief of police. Chief Parker, announced Poulson a few weeks before his swearing in, would stay.

“Chief Parker is to remain on the job on the basis of what he does from now on,” Poulson pointedly told the Los Angeles Times. “It will be up to the Chief to produce and to prove to the new Police Commission—and to me—that he is the proper man to remain at the head of the Police Department.”