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

On June 2, just a month after the riots had ended, the voters of Los Angeles made it official. Prior to the riots, Warren Christopher had drafted Charter Amendment F, which limited the police chief’s tenure to two five-year terms, stripped civil service protections from the chief’s position, and allowed the Police Commission to remove a chief for reasons other than misconduct. Charter Amendment F also targeted the protections Parker had won for the rank and file, adding a civilian to the department’s internal disciplinary panels and generally weakening procedural protections for police officers. Yet despite the unfavorable publicity that had followed the release of the Rodney King video, Amendment F’s electoral prospects had been uncertain. That changed after the riots. The vote now offered voters a chance to weigh in on the performance of Chief Gates. On June 2, 1992, by a two-to-one margin, voters approved Christopher’s charter amendment. Daryl Gates retired three weeks later. The system Bill Parker had created was finally dead.

^* Former intelligence division chief Daryl Gates would later insist this was much ado about nothing: “Many of those ‘files’ were 3 × 5 index cards used to reference files which contained only newspapers clippings.” Even if this is true, that still meant that the LAPD had collected, by Gates’s own estimation, “highly sensitive information” roughly 100,000 “subversives.” This was intelligence gathering on a very large scale. (Gates, Chief, 226.)

^* Denny lived only because four other neighborhood residents—African Americans all—saw what was happening on television and rushed out to the intersection in question. Finding Denny, one member of the party, a truck driver, drove him to a nearby hospital, where a team of five surgeons [two of them African Americans] managed to save his life. (Cannon, Official Negligence, 308-309.)

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK BEGAN five years ago, when I went to Los Angeles to report a story on LAPD chief William Bratton for Governing magazine. I had lived in Los Angeles previously and had been fascinated by its history. As a result, I was more interested in the history of the department than I might otherwise have been. I soon found myself pondering a puzzle: How did the police department of James “Two Gun” Davis and “Bloody Christmas”—the L.A. Confidential LAPD, as it were—suddenly become the Dragnet LAPD? How did a department that had answered for decades to corrupt politicians come to answer to no one? The more deeply I read, the more convinced I became that the answer was bound up in the life of Chief William H. Parker.

I knew Parker only as a name, an esteemed but controversial police chief whom criminologists associated with what they call “the professional model” of policing. To his many admirers, he was a saint and a prophet. To his many detractors, he was an “arrogant racist” who nearly destroyed the west’s greatest city. I approached him as a person. For that initial introduction, I must first thank Sgt. Steve Williams and Regina Menez of the William H. Parker Police Foundation, and Parker Foundation president Kenneth Esteves for generously opening the archive records to me. Retired LAPD officer Dennis DeNoi was an early and enthusiastic guide to their contents. After a week of reading in the archives, I was convinced that the story of Chief Parker’s LAPD was central to the history of Los Angeles and determined to write about it. My agent, Jill Kneerim, offered encouragement and wise counsel from the start. She pushed this book in all the right ways.

The Los Angeles Police Department was exceptionally supportive from the beginning. The Police Commission, the city attorney’s office, and Chief Bratton gave me access to internal departmental records from the period, making me only the second outside researcher so favored. I gratefully acknowledge their help and support. Todd Gaydowski, records management officer for the City of Los Angeles, facilitated my every request. Mary Grady, Richard Tefank, and Tamryn Catania were unfailingly helpful.

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the first researcher given access to the LAPD’s departmental files, Arizona State University professor Edward Escobar. Professor Escobar pointed me to one of the city’s most valuable historical resources, the LAPD scrapbooks housed at the City Records Center atop the Piper Technical Center downtown. Professor Escobar also invited me into his own home for a week to review copies of LAPD files from the 1950s and 1960s that were deaccessioned by the department in 1999. His personal collection now constitutes the most complete repository of official records from this era. I greatly appreciate his hospitality and admire his trailblazing work in the history of Chicano Los Angeles.