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

“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.^*