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

The report’s criticism of the Police Commission was more pointed. It noted, with wonder, that “no one, not a single witness, has criticized the Board for the conduct of the police, although the Board is the final authority in such matters. We interpret this as evidence that the Board of Police Commissioners is not visibly exercising authority over the Department vested in it by the City Charter.” Yet the commission’s recommendations—that the Police Commission meet more frequently, request more staff, and get more involved, were strikingly naive. The Police Commission’s powerlessness was not simply a matter of its occasional meetings and limited resources. It also reflected a deliberate, decade-long strategy by Chief Parker to assert the prerogatives of the professional policeman over those of the casually involved citizen. A mere exhortation was hardly an effective remedy against as skilled a politician as Bill Parker.

To many on the left, the McCone Commission’s report was a bitter disappointment. A January 1966 assessment by the California advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights criticized the report for ignoring warnings, such as the one sounded by assistant attorney general Howard Jewell, that the bitter conflict between Parker and civil rights leaders might well lead to riots. But to Parker, even mild criticism smacked of a personal attack.

Back on the job after a six-week period of rest and recuperation, he responded with characteristic bluntness.

“I think they’re afraid I’m going to run for governor,” Parker told the Los Angeles Times. “[T]his is just a political attack on me in an attempt to use the Police Department as a scapegoat and to repeat the completely false charge that the Police Department caused the rioting.”

In fact, it was Mayor Yorty who was planning to run for governor against Pat Brown—as a law-and-order conservative. Not surprisingly, Yorty backed Parker’s response to Watts 100 percent. Politically, Parker had become a potent symbol of law and order. Personally, Yorty worried about Parker’s health. On December 16, Yorty wrote to the Police Commission to propose appointing a civilian police administrator to assist Parker in his job. Nothing came of the idea.

Forced to choose between Chief Parker and his critics, L.A.’s elected politicians went with the police. In March 1966, the city council voted to commend Chief Parker for his management of the department and the “pattern of realistic human relations” he had established with the city’s African American community. Only three members of the council, Tom Bradley, Gilbert Lindsay, and Billy Mills, voted against this curiously worded expression of support.

Parker’s popularity dissuaded the city’s elected officials from criticizing him directly. “It’s most plausible that Chief Parker is the most powerful man in Los Angeles,” mused Los Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler to a Washington Post reporter that summer. “He is the white community’s savior, their symbol of security.”

Privately, however, many recognized that Parker was the major obstacle to improved race relations in the city. On March 4, 1966, an FBI agent who’d attended a special panel on Watts at the National Association of District Attorneys in Tucson reported on his conversation with L.A. district attorney Evelle Younger and Judge Earl Broady, a member of the McCone Commission and an African American. Both Younger and Broady described Parker’s “ingrained action [sic] against Negroes” as “the major stumbling block to any problem of effective community relations.” Younger also identified the LAPD’s failure to recognize or promote black officers as a major problem. Both men said that they believed Parker would have resigned by now if not for demands from civil rights groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality that he step down. (Parker didn’t want to lose face.) Younger also confided that Chief Parker was a very sick man. Less than a week later, Parker was hospitalized for “a temporary cardiac incapacity.” Not until June 1 was Parker able to resume command of the department.

On July 5, 1966, Chief Parker sent a memorandum to the city council that represented a serious attempt to come to terms with the city’s public safety needs. In it, Parker returned to one of his favorite themes: the need to increase the size of the LAPD. The memo noted that in October 1965, L.A.’s ratio of police officers per thousand residents had fallen to a mere 1.87—little more than half of New York’s 3.31 officers per thousand. Yet while L.A.’s population had risen 17 percent since 1958 (and serious crime had risen 47 percent), the size of the police department had actually fallen. One table comparing the number of police per 1,000 residents in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles made a powerful case for Parker’s argument that Los Angeles had made a disastrous decision to underinvest in its police force: