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

To nonblacks, such accounts were easy to dismiss. The outspoken publisher of the Eagle, Charlotta Bass, was, if not a Communist, then at the very least a fellow traveler. Moreover, police department investigations rarely substantiated these dramatic tales of wrongdoing. Indeed, some proved so frivolous that the police department began to urge prosecutors to charge people who brought unwarranted complaints against the department with making false statements about the police. Even black Angelenos were sometimes skeptical of the Eagle, preferring instead the more conservative Sentinel. But the Sentinel, too, was replete with stories of black men and women going about their business and running afoul of the police. To African Americans, the sheer accumulation of anecdotes was compelling. White residents rarely heard or read about these stories.

      AS THE HEAD of internal affairs, Bill Parker might have been expected to take a stance on such issues, but there’s no evidence he did. Instead, Parker focused almost exclusively on corruption and the underworld. Yet there is reason to believe that Parker was initially seen as something of a progressive on race relations. The two commissioners who initially supported Parker for chief were Irving Snyder, who was Jewish, and Dr. J. Alexander Somerville, who was African American. Presumably, these men saw Parker as a fair-minded individual. The second reason for believing Parker would be fair-minded arose from his treatment of African American policewoman Vivian Strange.

When he was sworn in as chief, Parker made a striking promise to the rank and file: When it came to promotions, he would always pick the person at the top of the civil service eligibility list. The first test of this policy came almost immediately, when Strange became eligible to make sergeant, a rank that no African American woman had ever before attained. Strange was not popular in the department, where she had a reputation as someone who “hated” white people so much that she wouldn’t ride in the same car with them. Fifty years after her promotion to sergeant, one senior LAPD commander described her as “a bitch.”

Strange may (or may not) have been an unpleasant person; however, she clearly understood something that the department’s white officers did not—namely, that a black woman in a car with a white man in south Los Angeles was likely to be seen as a prostitute. Insisting on driving herself to meetings in African American neighborhoods wasn’t standoffish; it was an attempt to avoid humiliation. Whatever her personality, Parker did not hesitate when her name came up on the sergeant eligibility list. That November, he made Strange the LAPD’s first female African American sergeant.

But those who hoped for further steps toward equality were disappointed. Parker did not change the department’s unstated policy of not placing black officers in positions of command over white officers. He also dismissed the idea that the LAPD had a race-relations problem. In a March 11, 1953, letter to a resident who had written Mayor Bowron to complain about police abuse, Parker presented a rebuttal noting that over the course of the year 1952, the LAPD had received 1,068 complaints. During that same period, his letter continued, the department had made “a minimum of 1,741,860 contacts.” In other words, .0006 of the officer contacts had resulted in complaints. Of those, “259 (or 24.3 percent) were substantiated and resulted in disciplinary action…. A total of 116 official reprimands were issued, 126 officers received a total of 1,453 days suspension…. Sixteen officers were terminated from the Department.” To Parker, the conclusion was clear: Police misconduct was exceedingly rare, and on those occasions where misconduct did occur, it was severely punished. The possibility that the department’s statistics might mislead—that complaints were discouraged, that communities of color might have become inured to behavior that would have generated waves of complaints in whiter, more affluent parts of town—was something Parker does not appear to have considered.

This represented a failure of imagination. Yet to his credit, when the facts were clear, Parker followed them to their logical conclusion. In mid-1953, Los Angeles lurched into an antigang hysteria after a group of young thugs robbed and killed a pedestrian downtown. “Rat Packs Attack,” screamed the newspapers; columnists demanded that the police department hit back, often in strikingly intemperate ways. (One newspaper editorial called on the department to prevent crime by using “clubs and mailed fists”—this less than two years after the “Bloody Christmas” beatings.) Much of the public anger had a decidedly anti-Hispanic tone. Parker would have none of it. In response to an inquiry from the grand jury, Parker calmly refused to treat a lone incident as a deadly trend.