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

The commission’s interest in Los Angeles was understandable. In little over a decade, Los Angeles had become one of the most diverse cities in the country. Close to 700,000 Mexican Americans lived in L.A.—more than in any other city in the world except for Mexico City. Its Jewish population, numbering roughly 400,000 people, was exceeded only by that of New York City. Most surprising of all was the size of its black population. In 1930, only 39,000 African Americans lived in Los Angeles. By 1960, the black population numbered 424,000. Los Angeles had the fifth largest African American community in the nation (behind New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Detroit)—far larger than any city in the South. And roughly 1,700 new black residents were arriving every day. But instead of opportunity, many found crowded, expensive housing, low-wage jobs, and simmering racial resentment. The result, according to the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, was a dangerous increase in tensions. In the second half of 1959 alone, there had been more than sixty racial “incidents,” from cross burnings to telephone harassment, almost all of them instigated by whites. Naturally, the Civil Rights Commission was interested in learning more about how the city was responding. But when it contacted Parker about testifying, the chief of the LAPD declined.

For years, Parker had endured attacks on his force for brutality and discrimination. Factually, charge after charge had been disproven—at least in Parker’s mind. Yet if anything, the volume and vehemence of the attacks were increasing. To Parker, the explanation was clear: Moscow was stepping up its attacks. Appearing in a public forum that was sure to be a sounding board for criticism of the police would only further its goals. Parker replied that he would provide the commission with factual evidence but he would not appear to testify before it.

Commission members were taken aback by this summary rejection. In mid-December, two staff members flew in from Washington to meet with the chief to assure him they were eager to obtain balanced testimony. Reluctantly, Parker agreed to appear before the commission. The hearings would begin January 25, 1960, and last for two days. Parker was scheduled to be the last speaker on the second morning of hearings.

The commission’s staff was true to its word. While the first day of hearings did include witnesses who were critical of the police, the tone of the day was surprisingly mild. A black engineer who’d recently purchased a home in a white section of the San Fernando valley dispensed helpful advice: sound out people in the neighborhood before trying to buy a house, look for financing at places other than traditional banks (which often refused to give black people mortgages for houses in “white” neighborhoods), and so forth—making it sound as if pervasive residential segregation could be addressed by a few commonsense workarounds. When it came to the conduct of the LAPD, local NAACP official Loren Miller suggested that many black residents distrusted the police department because they’d had bad experiences with Jim Crow justice back home. In other words, white police officers didn’t have a bias against black people; black people had a bias against police officers. This fit perfectly with Parker’s oft-stated belief that the police were the “real” embattled minority in contemporary American society.

By the time Chief Parker and his bevy of charts-toting aides arrived to present their testimony, the commissioners were primed for Parker’s point of view. He began with a very technical presentation on the problem of crime and policing in Los Angeles. Between the years 1950 and 1959, crime had climbed by 132 percent. Parker attributed the increase to the fact that the city was underpoliced (with only 1.8 officers per 1,000 residents) and overstocked with vagabonds and criminals, “many of them deliberately shipped here by officials of other localities who want to get rid of them.” This was really no explanation at all. The crime increase was new, yet L.A. had been underpoliced for decades, and police chiefs had complained of criminals being shipped in since the days of James Davis. But no commissioner called Parker on this point.

Parker then segued into a discussion of Los Angeles’s crime problem as it related to the city’s minority community. Police records showed that in 1958 Negroes committed crime at eleven times the rate of Caucasians. Latinos committed crime at five times the rate of Caucasians. This was not, the chief emphasized, a matter of some innate tendency toward crime among blacks and Latinos. Rather, he described it as “a conflict of cultures” and a result of the explosive growth of the African American community.