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

On August 29, Parker appeared on Meet the Press, the most respected of the Sunday news shows. There he faced off against host Lawrence Spivak and journalists from NBC News, Time, and the Washington Post. The questioning was polite—Parker was introduced as the most respected law enforcement officer in the United States, after J. Edgar Hoover—but pointed. Parker was asked about the causes of the riots, the lack of black officers on the force, and the persistent allegations of police abuse against minorities. His responses were unyielding. The rioting was sparked by a botched arrest by the California Highway Patrol. The LAPD had only a handful of Negro lieutenants because it was hard to find qualified Negroes willing to work in such an underpaid, underappreciated profession. Isolated verbal abuse of minorities was perhaps a problem, but so was the fact that eight hundred of his officers had been physically assaulted in the performance of their duties during the course of the previous year.

The response to these appearances was overwhelmingly positive. Parker claimed that in the weeks following the riots and his media appearances, he received 125,000 telegrams and letters—“ninety-nine percent of them favorable.” The city council, the American Legion, the Downtown Businessmen’s Association—virtually every major interest group in the city rushed to proclaim its admiration for Los Angeles’s indispensable chief of police.

      CALIFORNIA Governor Pat Brown begged to differ. By 1965, Brown was an old foe of Parker’s, having clashed repeatedly with him over wiretaps, capital punishment, and other criminal justice issues. Brown suspected that frustration over discrimination and high unemployment was behind the riots, not Communist agitators or some spreading malaise of lawlessness. On August 19, he appointed an independent commission, the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, headed by former director of Central Intelligence John McCone, to examine the cause and course of the riots. Brown charged the commission with delivering a thorough report as quickly as possible. The commission heard directly from more than seventy-nine witnesses; its staff interviewed hundreds of people, including ninety arrested during the riots. Twenty-six consult ants queried another ten thousand people.

The testimony of many of the African Americans who appeared before the commission and Chief Parker, Police Commission president John Ferraro, and Mayor Yorty was strikingly at odds. Witnesses such as councilman Tom Bradley and state assemblyman Mervyn Dymally expressed some sympathy for the plight of law enforcement officers attempting to patrol a dangerous ghetto. Yet they also insisted that the LAPD was both too slow to enforce the law in black neighborhoods and, when it did act, too often did so disrespectfully—sometimes even brutally. Negroes, testified Assemblyman Dymally, “generally expected the worst from police and got it.”

Parker, Ferraro, and Yorty rejected this critique. In his testimony before the McCone Commission on September 17, Parker put forward his analysis of what had happened—to a strikingly sympathetic audience. According to Chief Parker, Watts reflected the general decline of law and order throughout the United States. Parker’s rambling testimony, with its strange third-person references to himself (e.g., Negro leaders “seem to think that if Parker can be destroyed officially, then they will have no more trouble in imposing their will upon the police of America … because nobody else will dare stand up” to them) would later be described by the historian Robert Fogelson as “bordering on the paranoid.” But McCone and most white Angelenos found it perfectly reasonable.

Civil rights leaders attacked Parker for provocative comments, particularly his “we’re on top and they’re on bottom” statement. Critics interpreted this as an endorsement of the status quo. It was possible that Parker’s remarks in that particular instance were simply descriptive. But there is no mistaking the drift of Chief Parker’s comments. Despite his earlier experiences as a Catholic in an aggressively Protestant city, Parker had never been sympathetic to the civil rights movement. Its embrace of civil disobedience horrified him. He did not see the history of hundreds of years of legal oppression. He did not see the horrifying indignities that African Americans in his own department such as Vivian Strange or Tom Bradley (who once dressed up as a workman in order to go look at a house in a majority-white neighborhood he was considering buying so as not to draw unwanted attention) routinely faced. This was a tragic failure of empathy for the chief of a great African American city.