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

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.