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

      UNION ACTIVISM is not always the swiftest path to a police executive’s affection, but Parker’s legal work seems to have impressed Chief James Davis. Two more different personalities are hard to imagine. Parker was cerebral and wry. Davis was a peacock. Handsome (in a slightly puffy, heavily pomaded way), the chief loved uniforms, hats (particularly sombreros), braiding, and decorations. The Rev. Bob Shuler, a frequent critic, described him as “a man with pink complexion who looks like he had a massage every morning and his fingernails manicured.” However, few voiced such criticisms directly. Manicured or not, the 240-pound Texan looked as if he could snap most of his critics in half. A close observer of the Los Angeles political scene would later describe him as “a burly, dictatorial, somewhat sadistic, bitterly anti-labor man who saw communist influence behind every telephone poll.” He was also, arguably, insane. One of Davis’s favorite ways to entertain dignitaries visiting the department was to have a member of his beloved pistol-shooting team shoot a cigarette out of his mouth, a la William Tell.

Davis’s tactics were rough. One of his favorites was “rousting,” described thusly in an admiring 1926 Los Angeles Times profile by police reporter (and Chandler hatchet man) Albert Nathan:

First the word goes out of the chief’s office that the “rousting” is to begin and is to be kept up for a week.

Then all of the liquor squads take to the street, armed with pictures of the best known rum runners and the various members of their “mobs,” and begin looking for them.

As fast as any of the wanted men are located they are seized, handcuffed, loaded into a patrol wagon and escorted to jail. They are then locked up on charges of vagrancy or any other charge which may come to the mind of the arresting officer. In a few hours attorneys appear, writs are secured through the local courts and the prisoners are released…. One by one they are released and then arrested again and again. During a “rousting” a man may be arrested as many as six times, and each time has to stay in jail for one hour to two days before he gets out. After awhile the wanted men learn that every time they saunter up Spring Street they will be arrested and that they are not even safe in their homes.

Even at the time, this struck many as unlawful. “The rousting system may, as many contend, be unlawful,” the Times conceded, but no matter: “[T]his is known and records provide it: The system works.”

Nor were regular citizens exempt from his scrutiny. In 1936, Chief Davis dispatched 126 officers to sixteen highway and rail entry points on the California border to prevent “Okies” fleeing the dustbowl—he called them “the refuse of other states”—from entering California. The Los Angeles papers dubbed it (approvingly) the Bum Blockade. Inspectors from the State Relief Administration reported that officers were “exercising extra-constitutional powers of exclusion, detention, and preemptive arrest” that “seemed more like the border checkpoints of fascist Europe than those of an American state.” Davis responded that 48 percent of the people turned back had criminal records.

“It is an axiom with Davis that constitutional rights are of benefit to nobody but crooks and criminals, and that no perfectly law-abiding citizen ever has any cause to insist on ‘constitutional rights,’” reported the Los Angeles Record sarcastically. “Chief Davis honestly and sincerely believes that the whole country would be better off if the whole question of constitutional rights was forgotten and left to the discretion of the police.”

But as implausible as it may seem, Chief Davis was also something of a reformer.^[3] One of Davis’s first steps was to reinstitute rules against accepting gratuities and soliciting rewards that had lapsed under his predecessor. During his first forty-five months in office, Davis discharged 245 officers for misconduct. However, the strongest evidence for the proposition that Chief Davis was a reformer comes from his treatment of Bill Parker.

In 1934, Chief Davis turned to Parker to draft the bylaws for his beloved training facility in the hills of Elysian Park, today’s Los Angeles Police Academy. Yet despite this interaction with Chief Davis, Parker’s promotional path continued to be a rocky one. On June 5, 1935, Parker took the examination for lieutenant. He scored sixth on the written test, lower on the more subjective oral test, and ended up in the number ten position on the promotional eligibility list. Not until January 18, 1937, was he promoted to the position of lieutenant—and then only after two officers with lower scores had been promoted before him.