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

The Combination had finally been smashed. In a world with Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel on the loose, it was simply too dangerous for men like Guy McAfee to operate in Los Angeles without police protection. Moreover, it seemed evident that the new mayor was determined to “close” Los Angeles. And so the organized crime figures who had held sway over the L.A. underworld since the 1920s left Los Angeles. Most relocated to a dusty little town in the Nevada desert where gambling was legal and supervision was lax—Las Vegas.

Mayor Bowron was exultant. “We’ve broken the most powerful ring that ever had an American city in its grip,” he exulted to Richardson. “We’ve swept the police department clean for the first time in many years.”

The sphere of police autonomy that Bill Parker had so laboriously constructed also seemed to have been swept away.

For four years, Parker and the Fire and Police Protective League had worked to restrict politicians’ authority over the LAPD. On paper, chief and officers alike now enjoyed substantial legal protections. Yet when the stakes were high, those protections proved to be worthless. In a matter of months, Bowron had forced out the entire senior leadership of the police department, without a prosecutor indicting a single officer, without the Police Commission acting on a single complaint, without a single review board convening. The prospect of a powerful, independent police chief must have seemed impossibly remote.

Yet the triumph of the politicians was not complete. When Bowron’s new Police Commission attempted to rescind the city charter amendments that Cooke and Parker had written—returning disciplinary authority to the chief of police (and thus to the mayor and Police Commission who appointed and oversaw him)—the city council objected. Nor did the council embrace reformers’ proposals for a new city charter, one that would have greatly strengthened the mayor’s rather limited powers over the executive branch of government. In short, the legal protections Parker’s charters had created remained, even as Mayor Bowron drained them of their significance. They simply lay fallow, waiting for a chief who would have the skill and knowledge to breathe life into them.

      IN MAY 1939, Parker got his first clear shot at becoming that chief.

In theory, promotion in the LAPD was strictly meritocratic. Under ordinary circumstances, officers sat for promotional exams roughly every two years. A written exam typically accounted for 95 percent of their scores; the remaining 5 percent was determined by an oral exam and by seniority. Officers were then ranked by their results and placed on a promotional list, from which all new appointments had to be made. But the onset of the Great Depression—and the appearance of Joe Shaw—had disrupted this process. Between 1929 and 1936, hiring in the department had essentially been frozen. In 1936, Joe Shaw had overseen a new round of civil service examinations—and, rumor had it, helpfully sold answers to the questions for all fifty positions waiting to be filled. The department’s promotion lists were so suspect that Mayor Bowron’s new Police Commission decided to start from scratch. It threw out the previous lists and announced a new round of competitive examinations. Among the positions up for grabs was that of chief of police.

The acting chief of police, David Davidson, disclaimed any interest in the job, saying he preferred “not to be pushed around every time a new administration took office.” Capt. R. R. McDonald was known to be the mayor’s favorite, yet Bowron’s handpicked Police Commission nonetheless announced that it would make a purely meritocratic choice. The candidate who placed highest on the civil service exam would be the Police Commission’s choice.

One hundred seventy-one officers sat for the written examination for chief, including acting captain Bill Parker. Thirty-one were called back to complete the oral portion of the test. Once again, Parker was among the top group. On June 15, 1939, Parker received his score from the Board of Civil Service Commissioners: He had received a final grade of 78.1, which placed his name eighth on the tentative eligible list. The name at the top came as a surprise to everyone: Lt. Arthur Hohmann. After several weeks of hemming and hawing, the Police Commission decided to recognize Hohmann’s ranking and appointed him chief.