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

That was how the elite were treated. In March 1929, two plainclothes officers stopped a Finnish immigrant whom they had mistaken for a suspect. Indignant, the man launched into a tirade about the police that suggested that the man held “radical” political views. The officers responded by hauling him into police headquarters and working him over with brass knuckles. Only after the man, face pulped and bloodied, abjectly proclaimed his newfound admiration for the police was he released. The district attorney brought charges against the officers in question, but they were later dismissed.

Cops sometimes acted violently because they believed the system was corrupt. “Good men would not serve on juries, nor would they take time from their private interests to act as witnesses in court trials—if they could get out of it,” wrote Leslie White in his 1936 classic, Me, Detective. “Business men and good citizens did not want their homes robbed and their daughters raped, but they did want liquor for themselves, and prostitutes and gambling were good for business.” As a result, some officers took it on themselves to dispense justice. For, as Detective White put it, “[a] smart lawyer can keep a crook out of jail … buy or bamboozle a jury, but he cannot prevent the cops from beating the hell out of a crook.”

So some did. People arrested by the police were often detained for days—sometimes even for weeks—before being brought before a judge. Prisoners were frequently held incommunicado—no contact with family or friends, much less an attorney—until they confessed. When faced with hardened cons, the police routinely shifted prisoners into cold, dark cells without beds or chairs or into “sweat boxes.” They also resorted to “the third degree.” Typically, this involved round-the-clock questioning and sleep deprivation, a form of torture that almost always produced the desired confession. When it didn’t—or if the police were simply pissed—the “third degree” could also involve beating prisoners with clubs, fists, or rubber hoses. Central Division station even had a special cell where such beatings occurred. “Screams have been heard and complaints from prisoners are frequent,” reported one investigation of jail conditions.

Parker would later describe this period as “the bad old good old days.”

Remarkably, the LAPD was actually less violent than most big-city police departments. In Chicago, prisoners were routinely beaten with phone books, manacled and hung from pipes, and teargassed. Still, Los Angeles was clearly not a city where people were equal under the law. Parker soon came to the sickening realization that Los Angeles “was in the clutch of hoodlums.” Dumb hoodlums: IQ tests administered in the early twenties found that a significant number of police officers were “low-grade mental defectives.” Drunken, dumb hoodlums. Sometimes, Parker would later recall, “I was the only sober man in the office.”

Not reassuring words from a man who was almost certainly an alcoholic.

Parker’s second arrest was more successful. Gazing out the window as he was riding home on one of the yellow Los Angeles Railway streetcars that crisscrossed the city, Parker noticed a man running toward his streetcar, carrying a woman’s fur coat. Panting heavily, the man stepped onto the streetcar. He was a big guy—over six feet tall, probably weighing at least two hundred pounds—with long arms; small, deep-set eyes; and a broad chest. Something about him looked familiar. Then Parker realized that he matched the description of a man wanted by the San Francisco police who had terrorized the city for weeks by attacking people with a long knife.

Parker edged over to the man and asked, in what he hoped was a casual voice, “Say, where’d you get that coat?”

“What’s it to you?” the man snarled, turning away.

Parker told the man he was a policeman and patted him down. He found—and confiscated—a long-bladed knife. Convinced that he had happened across the wanted man, Parker signaled for the motorman to stop—and informed the suspect that he was under arrest. Then he pulled the man off the streetcar and dragged him, “protesting and resisting,” to a police call box, where he called for a patrol wagon. At police headquarters, the department confirmed that Parker had nabbed the man San Franciscan papers had taken to calling Jack the Ripper.

It was a major coup for a rookie officer. His superiors, doubtless, were not pleased. A rookie had no right to make such an arrest: A savvier officer would have allowed a more senior officer to take the credit. But then no one thought Bill Parker was savvy; on the contrary, he was either one of the dumbest men on the force or one of the most obstinate. Either way, he needed to be taught a lesson. So when Central Division got word one day that a shopkeeper had taken two employees hostage, the lieutenant on duty knew just who to send.

“He’s got a repeating shotgun,” the lieutenant said. “Take it away from him and bring him in.”