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

“I wish that crime were a simple plague to be solved by isolating a troublesome microbe, but it is not,” Parker declared in a 1953 speech on crime and belief. “I wish it could be eliminated materialistically, by continually supplying Americans with chrome fixtures, softer beds, and shorter work hours, but I know that it cannot be thus eradicated. Certainly I do wish that the police had it within their power to solve the problem alone, but I know that they cannot.” Only by restoring the citizenry’s belief in the sanctity of the law could chaos be avoided, he concluded.

Parker’s speeches called his audiences to a sterner morality. But the chief’s worldview was fatalistic, and his analysis of society’s problems discouraged practical responses. It was one thing to argue that the police weren’t responsible for the increase in crime. But Parker seemed to be suggesting that neither police efforts nor any “materialistic” initiatives could address the rise in crime. Politically, this was a convenient proposition for everyone. It allowed Parker to avoid questions about why what was supposedly the nation’s best police force was presiding over such dramatic increases in crime, and it allowed politicians to avoid raising taxes to expand a department run by a man many of them distrusted. It was easier to flatter the chief for creating the country’s greatest police force, one that could do more with less.

But of course, Parker still faced the challenge of policing a growing city with a stagnant police force. The key to doing more with less was intelligence. Intelligence kept the underworld from buying politicians, corrupting police officers, and controlling the police department. Intelligence was the key to taking the fight to the underworld, and in the mid-1950s, the underworld seemed to be the locus of serious crime in Los Angeles. But the department’s ability to collect intelligence was about to suffer a series of blows from an unexpected and formidable adversary—the courts.

      FOR DECADES, police departments had enjoyed wide latitude in how they went about apprehending criminal suspects. In 1914, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that evidence improperly or illegally obtained could not be used at trial—a principle known today as the exclusionary rule. But the exclusionary rule applied only to federal law enforcement agencies. For local law enforcement, the proof was in the pudding. If the evidence was incriminating, courts typically asked few questions about how it was obtained. Only the most flagrant examples of police misconduct could bestir most judges to exclude evidence. The result was corner-cutting. Civil liberties advocate Hugh Manes would later note that between 1931 and 1962, the LAPD served only 631 search warrants, about 20 a year, a shockingly low number. Police routinely responded to truly serious crimes by throwing dragnets around entire neighborhoods and “tossing” hotels, motels, and even private homes in search of potential suspects. Yet in its 1949 decision Wolf v. Colorado, the court reiterated its opinion that the exclusionary rule did not apply to local law enforcement agencies.

Of course, not every method was legal. Federal statutes prohibited wiretapping, as did California state law. The prohibition was absolute: No provision was provided for law enforcement agencies to seek court permission to tap a phone line. Parker understandably viewed this as a major problem. But the department did have a work-around; it simply broke into people’s homes and businesses and installed dictographs. The police department reasoned that since these were stand-alone recording devices that did not involve “tapping” a phone line, they were legal, end of story. The courts agreed—until November 1953, when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of Irvine v. California.

The case involved a suspected bookmaker (Irvine) who’d been targeted by the Long Beach Police Department. Officers had brought in a locksmith to make copies of the man’s house keys, entered his house, and then installed a dictograph in his bedroom closet—all without a search warrant. The evidence obtained from the “bug” was the basis of the man’s subsequent conviction. During his first trial in state court, the bookmaker had argued that by breaking into his house without a warrant, police had violated his Fourth Amendment rights to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure. The state court disagreed, as did the state appeals court. So Irvine petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, successfully.

On February 8, 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling. It noted that repeatedly entering the petitioner’s home without a warrant “was a trespass and probably a burglary.” The majority opinion described dictographs as “frightening instruments of surveillance and invasion of privacy, whether [used] by the policeman, the blackmailer, or the busybody.