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

      BILL PARKER was also struggling against a failing body. In May 1964, Parker left Los Angeles for the Mayo Clinic. The papers reported he would be gone for a week of “skin and arthritic treatment.” In fact, it appears that he was undergoing serious gastrointestinal surgery. Associates were shocked at his appearance upon his return. Parker was gaunt and appeared to have aged several years. However, surgery didn’t seem to have diminished his zest for rhetorical combat. When later that summer rioting broke out in four eastern cities after clashes between police officers and African Americans, Parker was adamant that Los Angeles would see no similar large-scale disturbances. At appearances throughout the city, the chief returned to his theory of outside agitators, noting that most of the protesters who turned out for civil rights demonstrations in Los Angeles weren’t even black.

Yet signs of racial strife were everywhere. That April, black youths had clashed with police on multiple occasions, first at a track meet at Jefferson High School, then, two weeks later, at the scene of a traffic accident. (Parker blamed “social unrest and resentment against all forms of governmental authority” for the disturbances.) In May, California assistant attorney general Howard Jewell warned, in a report to the state AG, that the bitter conflict between Parker and civil rights leaders risked sparking rioting unless the tensions were addressed. Judge Loren Miller, a member of the Jewell Commission, was even more pessimistic.

“Violence in Los Angeles is inevitable,” wrote Miller. “Nothing can or will be done about it until after the fact. Then there will be the appointment of a commission which will damn the civil rights leaders and the Chief alike.”

Parker vehemently disagreed.

“I doubt that Los Angeles will become part of the battleground of the racial conflict that is raging in the United States today,” Parker told the Sigma Delta Chi journalism fraternity that fall. “This city is ten years ahead of other major metropolitan areas in assimilating the Negro minority.” Real unrest would only become a danger, Parker told the Sherman Oaks Rotary Club in the spring of 1964, if “the current soft attitude on the part of the republic to crime and Civil Rights demonstrations” continued.

Even with three African Americans on the city council, no one could check Chief Parker’s course. Councilman Bradley became so frustrated with the situation that in the spring of 1965, he even introduced legislation that would have made the chief of police more powerful. Bradley’s rationale was that it was time to end the charade that the Police Commission directed the department and hold accountable the man who really did. But like most of Bradley’s other attempts to restrain Parker, it failed. Bill Parker would chart his own destiny.

27

Watts

“This community has done a magnificent job [with race relations]. We’re afraid to tell the truth, because it would prove this is the Garden of Eden.”

—Chief William Parker, June 25, 1963

ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, August 11, 1965, a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer, Lee Minikus, was waved down by a passing African American motorist. The motorist told Minikus that he’d just seen a white Buick headed up Avalon Boulevard, driving recklessly—“like he might be drunk or something.” Minikus, who was white, set off in pursuit and soon caught up with the speeding car. He pulled it over at 116th and Avalon. Its driver was twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye. His stepbrother Ronald, twenty-two, was also in the car. Office Minikus asked Marquette for his license. He didn’t have one. Smelling alcohol, Officer Minikus asked Marquette to get out of the car to perform the standard field sobriety test. Frye failed the test. Minikus went back to his motorcycle and radioed for his partner, who was patrolling the nearby Harbor Freeway. He also called for a patrol car to take Marquette in to be booked and a tow truck for the car. It was a minute or two after seven o’clock in the evening.