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

      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.