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

Anyone who’d spent a day on the streets of Newton Division realized that the LAPD maintained order in a certain way—with a heavy hand. In those days, most good beat officers were big, imposing men. Flagrant disrespect routinely resulted in a stiff dose of “street justice”—a bogus arrest, a painful jab with a baton, or worse. A greater police presence meant this happened more in African American parts of the city. It wasn’t necessarily a racial thing. Take a tough neighborhood, add thousands of newcomers who don’t know the ropes, apply police officers who believe that their personal safety depends on being tough, and you’ve got a recipe for trouble, regardless of the color of the people involved. But there were other reasons that the LAPD was particularly insistent on “respect.”

Police departments in cities with political machines such as New York and Chicago were big organizations padded with patronage jobs. Ward bosses often reserved civil service jobs for neighborhood supporters. Such forces frequently had problems with incompetency and corruption. But they also had advantages. Officers and neighborhood residents tended to know each other. Ward bosses and precinct or division captains generally worked hand in hand. And because the number of officers relative to the population being policed was often quite large, officers knew that if they got into a scrape, there were almost always other officers close at hand. The LAPD’s officers didn’t have that assurance. Backup was rarely around the block. Sometimes, it was miles away. As a result, when the LAPD acted, it went in hard and fast. It was a style of policing driven in part by fear. But all that many residents saw was cocky aggression.

This left a bitter taste in black neighborhoods. While the police demanded deference and respect, many of its officers seemed unable—or unwilling—to distinguish between actual hoodlums and ordinary citizens. It was one thing to get tough with a known criminal. It was quite another to repeatedly stop and insultingly question a law-abiding citizen. But for whatever reason, that is precisely what the LAPD too often did.

In the African American press, story after story chronicled the indignities. “EVERY NEGRO A SUSPECT,” screamed the California Eagle in a March 20, 1947, article on the police hunt for a pair of men who’d shot two police officers over the course of the preceding weekend. A shooting was, of course, a serious matter, but the police response was indiscriminate. “No Negro, no matter how little he fitted the description of the two fugitives, was immune from police search and question,” continued the paper bitterly. Every few months, the paper would carry a horrifying story about a black man—or a black woman—who had suffered insult, if not assault, at the hands of the police.

“With the death this week of Dan Jense, a cafe owner who was brutally beaten by police in the course of a raid on his establishment, the spotlight shifts to police brutality and brings into focus the repeated complaints which have come out of minority communities for the past several years,” wrote the Eagle in June 1949. But of course, the mainstream press didn’t shift its attention to police brutality. Neither did the city’s politicians. “Mayor Bowron has steadfastly defended the police in every reported incident of brutality,” the Eagle lamented.

“The cold-blooded killing of August Salcido and the fatal beating of Herman Burns, climaxed the uninhibited ‘legal lynching’ campaign of terror that the police department has been carrying on against Negroes and Mexicans for some time,” opined the paper on another occasion:

Delegation after delegation has appeared before the Mayor demanding that he put a stop to the unnecessary rousting, beating and intimidating of citizens in the minority community. Bowron has promised time and again, he would check these abuses, but they have continued and grown.

The steps the mayor had taken, the paper continued, such as appointing an African American to monitor allegations of brutality, were little more than “window-dressing.” With scandal again threatening the department’s leadership, the paper foresaw “token raids” to divert attention from the main action.

“Any so-called ‘clean-up’ on the East Side [meaning east of Main Street] would be in reality a cover-up for a campaign of intimidation and police terrorism,” the paper heatedly concluded.