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

Chief Parker and Mayor Yorty’s brush-off inspired black Angelenos to take action. The following year, in 1963, three African Americans were elected or appointed to the city council, Billy Mills, Gilbert Lindsay, and Tom Bradley. All had made police accountability a major part of their campaign platforms. All soon discovered that they could make no headway against Chief Parker.

That August, America watched while civil rights demonstrators converged in Washington, D.C., for a march to demand jobs and freedom for all Americans. To many Americans, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was a thrilling paean to the promises of freedom. To Chief Parker, it was an invitation to revolt. Immediately after the March on Washington, law enforcement and National Guard officials met to draft a plan to respond to civil disorder. An emergency plan was developed, numbering nearly a hundred pages in length. Later that fall, LAPD officials wrote a memo on police-guard coordination that included a provision that would permit the use of hand grenades against protesters.

The emergence of a civil rights movement founded on the concept of civil disobedience likewise disturbed Parker greatly—more greatly than the conditions that prompted its emergence. Parker seemed to believe that Los Angeles already was as integrated as it could be, short of embracing “reverse discrimination” (i.e., forcing white people to work with and live next to black people when they would rather not). When asked how he would have responded to civil rights demonstrations had he been the chief of police in Birmingham, Parker ducked the question. “Los Angeles is not Birmingham,” he replied. To Parker, the willingness of Los Angeles-area civil rights organizations to criticize the LAPD—a department that Chief Parker firmly believed had done “a magnificent job” with race relations—afforded the final proof that the civil rights movement was essentially pro-Communist and antipolice.

In Chief Parker’s world, race relations had a “through the looking glass” quality. The LAPD arrested a higher percentage of minorities than other big-city police departments because it enforced the law more equally than other departments. Race relations in Los Angeles seemed bad because race relations were so good that the city had become a target for agitators. Unnamed forces, Parker insisted, had chosen Los Angeles as “a proving ground” for their strategy of damaging the police precisely because it took racial complaints so seriously. Fortunately, the chief asserted, it wasn’t working. “Negroes,” he confidently asserted in the summer of 1963, “aren’t ready to make big demonstrations.” Nor would he permit the threat of disorder to intimidate the department into unilaterally disarming.

“This city can’t be sandbagged by some threat of disorder into destroying itself,” he told Los Angeles Times columnist Paul Coates in the summer of 1963. “We have the most advanced department in the nation in human relations.”

The country’s greatest police department would not allow its youngest great city to go up in flames.

^* On May 14, an all-white coroner’s jury acquitted the officer involved in the point-blank shooting of one of the men at the mosque, Ronald X Stokes. Stokes had been shot with his hands raised because the officer who killed him felt endangered. The jury’s deliberations took less than thirty minutes. The Black Muslims were not treated so leniently. Despite Broady’s efforts, on July 14, 1963, eleven members of the Nation of Islam were convicted on a variety of charges and given prison sentences ranging from one to ten years. (“Sentences Reimposed on 11 Black Muslims,” Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1965.)

26

The Gas Chamber

“Don’t worry about me.”

—Mickey Cohen

IN JANUARY 1962, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld Cohen’s tax conviction. Mickey returned to Alcatraz. But two weeks later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas stepped in again, allowing Mickey to leave on bail once more while the U.S. Supreme Court considered his final appeal. Soon thereafter, a reporter for the Valley News found him living quietly in a rented house in Van Nuys. He complained about the lack of closet space and the small hot water heater. He explained that he and Hagen were engaged and hoped to be married as soon as he won his income tax appeal. He was even working on a new version of his life story, tentatively titled The Poison Has Left Me. Meanwhile, on March 5, 1962, Mickey Cohen’s trial for the murder of Jack Whalen got under way. If convicted, Cohen faced the possibility of the gas chamber.