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

Gates had enjoyed a rapid ascent in Parker’s police department. In 1963, Parker confidant James Hamilton, the longtime head of the Los Angeles Police Department’s intelligence division, had left the department to go to the National Football League. (The NFL was having problems with gambling and organized crime, and Robert Kennedy had recommended his old friend as the perfect person to clean it up.) No position in the department was more sensitive; Parker tapped Gates to fill it. After two years of exemplary service in that position and another outstanding performance on the civil service exam, in June 1965 Gates became (at the age of thirty-eight) one of the youngest inspectors in the history of the LAPD. A Herald-Examiner story on the appointment noted that Gates was “rumored to be Parker’s choice as a successor.” He was assigned to command Patrol Area 3—Highland Park, Hollywood, Hollenbeck, and Central Division. But in early August, the inspector who was normally in charge of Patrol Area 2—South-Central and southwest L.A.—went on vacation. As a result, those areas were added to Gates’s command.

On the evening of August 11, Gates was heading over to check on security at the Harvey Aluminum Company plant at 190th and Normandie, where workers were out on strike. Over the radio he heard a dispatcher alerting all units to “a major 415”—a large-scale civil disturbance. Gates was about a mile from the intersection of Avalon and 116th Street. He decided to drive over and see what was going on.

What he saw was mayhem. “A kind of crazed carnival atmosphere had broken out,” Gates recalled later in his memoirs. “Laughing, shouting, hurling anything they could find, people were running helter-skelter through the streets. Cars—ours and those of unsuspecting motorists—were pelted with rocks and bottles.” But, as Gates noted, “no single mob had formed.” Moreover, most of the violence was confined to an eight-block area that centered on the scene of the Frye arrest. There was still a chance to control the chaos.

The police had regrouped at a gas station just off the Imperial Highway, where an ad hoc command post had been set up. As the ranking officer, Gates took charge of the field office. Using the roughly twenty patrol cars on hand, Gates attempted to cordon off the area. It was seventy police officers against a mob of five hundred, eight hundred, a thousand—no one really knew for sure. That wasn’t counting reporters, whose presence seemed to spur the youths to additional acts of violence. Nonetheless, by the early hours of the morning it appeared that the police had managed to contain the violence. By 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning, the rock-throwing had died down and the streets had largely cleared. Deputy Chief Murdock, with whom Gates had been in communication all evening, gave the order for the exhausted police officers to retire.

      LOS ANGELES was not having a race riot.

If officers on the street were attuned to the possibility of spontaneous racial violence, Chief Parker was not. Even as the violence spread, Parker told a Los Angeles Times reporter that the city was not experiencing a race riot—where blacks attacked whites—“since all the rioters were Negroes.” Rather, what Los Angeles was witnessing was an outburst of childish emotionalism—“people who gave vent to their emotions on a hot night when the temperature didn’t get below 72 degrees.”

In fact, Parker’s police department had been caught off guard—despite ample warnings. Earlier that summer, for instance, Chief Parker received a letter from B. J. Smith, director of the Research Analysis Corporation in McLean, Virginia. Smith noted that Rochester, Philadelphia, New York, and Newark had all experienced race riots during the summer of 1964. How was the country’s greatest police department preparing for the possibility of urban violence? Smith’s questions were timely: “What are the signs or indications of impending civil disturbance? What measures can be taken to avert this trouble? What techniques are most effective for controlling and discrediting demonstrations and riots?”

Chief Parker’s response, in a letter written on May 12, was telling. “The Los Angeles Police Department has never experienced an insurgency situation,” he replied. Moreover, it never expected to. “There have been no occurrences of civil disturbances nor serious conditions which might initiate such a situation in this city.” He concluded the letter by referring Smith to cities that had.