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

The more time General Worton spent in office, the more convinced he became that the entire system was flawed. The notion that the department answered to a board of civilians was nothing more than a polite fiction—and was exposed as such whenever the police department had something sensitive to handle, such as a brutality complaint. These were dealt with internally, by department personnel alone. This rubbed Worton the wrong way. So too did the fact that while the mayor was held to account, politically, for the conduct of the police department, he exercised only indirect influence over the department, through his appointees to the Police Commission.

A better model was needed, Worton concluded, and it wasn’t hard to find one. Police departments in New York, Chicago, and Detroit all operated under a different management structure. In those cities, the mayor appointed a single civilian commissioner or superintendent to supervise the department. This commissioner or superintendent answered to the mayor. Day-to-day police department operations were run by a top-uniformed officer—in the NYPD, the chief of department. The Marine Corps had a similar structure. There the top-uniformed officer—the commandant—ran operations but answered to a civilian, the secretary of the Navy. Worton believed that the LAPD would benefit from a similar structure.

During the fall of 1949, he fleshed out his plan for reorganizing the department. It called for a non-civil-service commissioner who would be appointed by the mayor (subject to city council approval) to a three-year term. This commissioner would be responsible for setting goals for the department and would directly run important bureaus such as internal affairs, planning and accounting, records and identification, and communications. A uniformed police chief would serve under him and direct actual law enforcement activities. Worton believed such a reorganization could be accomplished without amending the city charter. As to who this new commissioner would be, most observers assumed that the candidate Worton had in mind was himself.

Mayor Bowron liked the idea. But Worton’s plan quickly encountered opposition from powerful forces—and from at least one member of his inner circle, Bill Parker. The disciplinary system that struck Worton as ill conceived was among Parker’s proudest accomplishments. With the department’s top job once again in reach, Parker had no intention of standing aside while an outsider gutted the system he had created. He boldly criticized General Worton’s proposed reforms. He insisted that a five-member civilian Police Commission whose members were each appointed to five-year terms would be more independent and responsive to the public than a single commissioner who answered only to the mayor would be.

“You’ll get a bad city administration someday,” Parker warned.

For months, the police department had stood by meekly while Mayor Bowron extended General Worton’s emergency term of office in legally dubious ways and considered plans to unilaterally reorganize the department. Now the forces of the status quo ante counterattacked. General Worton had suggested that the department could be reorganized without a charter amendment. A chorus of voices arose to question this sweeping claim. Reluctantly, Mayor Bowron agreed that his acting police chief’s plan would have to be submitted to the voters for their approval. As the weeks passed, it became increasingly clear that the only person who was really enthusiastic about this idea was Worton himself. Finally Mayor Bowron gave in and announced that he’d be scheduling an examination to select a new chief in the spring of 1950. Some two dozen LAPD officers promptly announced that they would sit for the examination, among them Bill Parker.

On July 10, participants’ scores were announced. Parker placed first. Thad Brown and Roger Murdock placed a distant second and third. That same day, General Worton notified the Police Commission that he wished to step down from his position at the end of the month. Legally, Mayor Bowron could select any of the top three candidates, but everyone knew that the choice was really between the two heavyweights, Brown or Parker. Both men now attempted to rally their allies. In Parker’s case, that meant the American Legion and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, including its new archbishop (soon to be cardinal), James Francis McIntyre. By 1948, there were 650,000 Roman Catholics in Los Angeles, and another 55,000 were arriving from across the country every year. Msgr. Thomas O’Dwyer, the top aide to Archbishop McIntyre, sent a pointed letter to Mayor Bowron, noting Parker’s many qualifications.