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

The memo concluded by noting that “if the recommended [police] manpower rate for 1958 were projected to a police-officer-per-thousand ratio in 1965, Los Angeles would need 11,010 police officers”—double the size of the current force. As for the chances of this happening, even Parker considered the idea “academic.” Thanks to his insistence on high standards (of a certain sort), the LAPD couldn’t even fill the much smaller number of positions that were currently available. But Parker’s fundamental analysis was almost certainly correct. Los Angeles was underpoliced—criminally so. It still is.

On the evening of July 16, 1966, Bill Parker went to a banquet at the Statler Hilton Hotel to receive an award from the Second Marine Division, which was celebrating its seventeenth annual reunion. He received a plaque citing him as one of the nation’s foremost police chiefs. After a few brief remarks, he walked back to his table, where Helen was sitting, while a thousand Marine Corps veterans gave him a standing ovation. He sat down, then, suddenly, he leaned back and started gasping for air. Slowly he crumpled to the floor. His heart had finally failed him. After almost thirty-nine years on the force, Chief William H. Parker was dead. He was sixty-one years old.

The public responded to Parker’s death with an outpouring of grief. Mayor Yorty declared himself to be “shocked and heart-broken.”

“Los Angeles and America will sadly miss our courageous and beloved Police Chief Parker,” Yorty declared. “He was a monument of strength against the criminal elements.”

Governor Pat Brown (a frequent Parker antagonist) praised the chief for his “courageous commitment to the rule of law.” Even adversaries such as A. L. Wirin had admiring words. Although they had “disagreed sharply on most subjects,” the civil liberties attorney declared, “I have admired him throughout the years as an efficient and dedicated police officer.”

Said councilman Tom Bradley, “I regret the death of a man who did much to change the image and practices of the police department, although he often spoke from emotion without considering the effect of his words.”

Only Thomas Kilgore, the western representative for Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, seemed willing to dissent: “His death will be a loss in the sense he put together a strong, disciplined police force. But I think his death will be a relief to the minority community, who believe he woefully misunderstood the social revolution taking place.”

At the funeral home, Parker’s casket was given a twenty-four-hour police honor guard. The day before the funeral, Parker’s body was brought to the City Hall rotunda to lie in state. More than three thousand mourners came to pay their respects and view Parker’s body. The funeral itself was scheduled for 10 a.m. the following day at St. Vibiana’s cathedral. Police and church officials alike were caught off guard by the massive turnout. Thousands of Angelenos—including Gov. Pat Brown, Republican gubernatorial nominee Ronald Reagan, and Mayor Sam Yorty—and police chiefs from sixty cities filled the cathedral for the requiem high mass, with Cardinal James Francis McIntyre as the officiant. Another 1,500 people lined Main Street to listen to the mass on loudspeakers and, afterward, to observe the hearse carrying Parker’s body, escorted by 150 LAPD motorcycle officers. The funeral procession to Parker’s grave site at the San Fernando Mission Cemetery was seven miles long. There, a military honor guard buried Chief Parker with full honors while the American Legion Police Post 381 band played “Hail to the Chief” as the casket was moved to the grave site. Taps was played, a rifle volley fired, and then Chief Parker was lowered into the earth.

^* In November 13, 1965, Saturday Review article, King offered the following explanation of why rioting had broken out in Los Angeles: “Los Angeles could have expected riots because it is the luminous symbol of luxurious living for whites. Watts is closer to it and yet further from it than any other Negro community in the country. The looting in Watts was a form of social protest very common through the ages as a dramatic and destructive gesture of the poor toward symbols of their needs.”

^* During the same interview, Parker also made it clear that “less than one percent” of L.A. County’s 600,000 African American residents were involved in the violence.

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R.I.P.

“I don’t want to be rude, but I got to beg off this thing.”

—Mickey Cohen

WILLIAM PARKER was dead, but the system he had created lived on.