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

In his public appearances, he was always careful to distinguish between Chief Parker, whom he promised to keep on, and the Police Commission, which he criticized mercilessly. But as election day approached, Yorty sharpened his rhetoric against the chief, describing the current police commissioners as “Parker’s appointees,” promising to clean house, and insinuating that Parker would probably resign as well. In private, and to select black audiences, Yorty may have gone even further. Many Parker foes certainly believed they had received a firm promise that as mayor Yorty would force Parker out. Yorty also promised to fully integrate the department. Not surprisingly, candidate Yorty soon noticed that he was being trailed by plain-clothes officers from the LAPD intelligence division.

In fact, Yorty did have some worrisome connections. One of his earliest and strongest supporters was Jimmy Bolger, the man the Shaws had put into former chief James Davis’s office as a secretary (and minder). After Davis’s forced resignation, Bolger had found refuge on the Board of Public Works, which for many years was the bastion of the old Frank Shaw camp. Bolger was a notorious figure, one widely considered to have been a direct link to the underworld in the 1930s. It was natural that Parker would be concerned about his reappearance. Yorty was less understanding. Like Poulson before him, he was soon fuming about the LAPD’s “Gestapo-like tactics” and complaining that the incumbent mayor was attempting to scare law-and-order voters with the specter of Parker’s dismissal.

Ultimately, however, it was race that decided the election.

One day before the general election, on May 30, Memorial Day, a black youth attempted to sneak onto a merry-go-round at Griffith Park. An attendant tried to make the seventeen-year-old pay. At this point, accounts of what happened diverge. The attendant and his employer claimed they were assaulted; others claimed that the seventeen-year-old fare-jumper was roughed up. A fight broke out; police officers rushed to the scene; and soon a mini-riot was under way, pitting roughly two hundred black rioters against a considerably smaller number of policemen. Dozens of black rioters and four LAPD officers were injured in the brawl.

The next day, newspapers splashed news of the incident across their front pages. The Los Angeles Times insisted that the incident was not a race riot—and that Los Angeles was not Alabama. But the city’s African American voters drew a different conclusion. Voters in South Los Angeles shifted decisively toward Yorty, who won by sixteen thousand votes. That shift, wrote the Los Angeles Times one week later, was “perhaps the single biggest factor in Mayor Poulson’s defeat.”

It now fell to Mayor Yorty to decide what he would do with his police chief. At his first postelection press conference, Yorty’s tone was harsh.

“I have confidence in [Parker] as an administrator, but as a public relations expert I think he could stand a lot of schooling and a lot of direction,” Yorty told the press. In the days that followed, Yorty was even more outspoken in his criticisms of the department. It was “perfectly obvious,” he told reporters, that “the department was used to check the history, from childhood to current date, of everybody even remotely connected with my campaign and even my [law] clients.” Asked if the mayor-elect thought Parker was aware of such activities, Yorty replied, “[H]e had to be.” Yorty further described such activities as illegal and vowed to investigate the department further after he was sworn in on July 1. There was thus considerable anticipation about the outcome of the two men’s first private meeting. Reporters observed a grim-faced Chief Parker heading into his conference with the mayor. They also noted what reporters described as “a bulging briefcase.” The two men emerged all smiles. An understanding had been reached. Yorty would replace most of the men on the Police Commission, but Parker would stay on as chief, with the mayor’s full support.

Rumor had it that Chief Parker had shown Mayor Yorty his file.

      “BLACK AND BLUE” brawls at Griffith Park were just one of Parker’s worries. By the time Mayor Yorty took office, Southern California police agencies had identified a new and altogether more worrisome adversary. Police called it The Muslim Cult. Its members preferred the Nation of Islam.

In the fall of 1959, the LAPD circulated a briefing and training memo from the Culver City Police Department that set forth the basic facts about the organization (as law enforcement understood it):

Briefing and Training Memo from the Culver City Police Department, Classified and Restricted, 11/1/1959

Introduction

Nation of Islam

Or

The “Muslim Cult”