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

At 2 a.m. on the morning of August 18, just days after the violence had finally subsided, the LAPD launched an all-out attack on what it saw as the epicenter of the violence—the Muslim Temple at 5606 South Broadway, headquarters for the Los Angeles chapter of the Nation of Islam. The ostensible cause of the raid was an early-morning anonymous phone call to Newton Division, claiming that the Black Muslims were stockpiling weapons. As the police were breaking down the door, they came under fire—or so they later claimed. Officers later explained that “pellets” had started “pounding” their cars. So the police opened fire. In all, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand rounds of ammunition slammed into the two-story stucco structure. Eventually, the occupants of the Temple signaled that they were ready to surrender. Fifty-nine Nation of Islam members were arrested. No guns were found. Three weeks later, a judge blamed the incident on the LAPD’s “imagination” and dismissed charges against the nineteen men charged with felony offenses. When African American councilman Billy Mills demanded that Parker come before the council to explain the raid, Parker refused, saying, “I suggest he read the City Charter and find out what his powers and limitations are.”

The following day, the Los Angeles Times noted with evident satisfaction that the “taboo” on white men entering the Temple “had been broken.” The paper further reported that while no guns had been found, the temple was full of seditious literature, including hundreds of leaflets that provocatively read, “Stop Police Brutality.” Police actions only bolstered the Black Muslims’ standing. Soon thereafter, Marquette Frye, the young man whose stop had sparked the Watts riots, joined the Nation of Islam.

      THE STREETS of Watts weren’t the only place where the LAPD went on the offensive. During the riots, the ailing chief had at times withdrawn from command decisions. However, he had kept up a busy schedule of television appearances, during which he forcefully criticized the rioters and defended the department. Now that the riots were over, Parker was ferocious in defending his men’s performance and his own legacy. Instead of sulking or hiding, he launched a media blitz.

Watts was not a failure of the department, the chief insisted. What had happened was a bad Highway Patrol stop on a hot day that gave the Communist Party and its allies the opening they had long hoped for. It did not matter that the men with the bullhorns were later identified as members of local community groups or that the cars moving with suspicious ease through the combat zone almost certainly contained gang members, not Communist Party organizers. The LAPD had not failed. Nor had Chief William Parker. He had not missed black Los Angeles’s anger and alienation. On the contrary, Chief Parker maintained that Watts had proved him right.

As evidence of a large conspiracy failed to turn up, Chief Parker turned to another explanation—one that emphasized black migration, the civil rights movement, and mass psychology. He was not shy about making his case. “A great deal of the courage of these rioters was based on the continuous attacks of civil rights organizations on the police,” declared Parker on CBS Reports later that month.

“They’re attempting to reach these groups … by catering to their emotions,” declared Parker (an emotional man who had no patience for that quality in others). “‘You’re dislocated, you’re abandoned; you’re abused due to color,’” Parker continued, mimicking and mocking the attitudes of civil rights supporters. The civil rights movement had unleashed the virus of civil disobedience—the belief that people “don’t have to obey the law because the law is unjust.” At the same time, a huge surge of black migration had “flooded a community that wasn’t prepared to meet them.” (Parker didn’t hide his own feelings about the matter: “We didn’t want these people to come in,” he told the panel.)^* Both factors laid the foundations for the uprising. One thing was for certain: The LAPD was not to blame.

“I think we are almost sadistic in the way we’re trying to punish ourselves over this thing without realizing what we have destroyed is a sense of responsibility for our own actions,” continued Chief Parker. “We have developed a shallow materialist society where everyone is a victim of their environment and are therefore not to be blamed for anything…. If you want to continue to live in that society, good luck to you.”