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

For months, the police department had stood by meekly while Mayor Bowron extended General Worton’s emergency term of office in legally dubious ways and considered plans to unilaterally reorganize the department. Now the forces of the status quo ante counterattacked. General Worton had suggested that the department could be reorganized without a charter amendment. A chorus of voices arose to question this sweeping claim. Reluctantly, Mayor Bowron agreed that his acting police chief’s plan would have to be submitted to the voters for their approval. As the weeks passed, it became increasingly clear that the only person who was really enthusiastic about this idea was Worton himself. Finally Mayor Bowron gave in and announced that he’d be scheduling an examination to select a new chief in the spring of 1950. Some two dozen LAPD officers promptly announced that they would sit for the examination, among them Bill Parker.

On July 10, participants’ scores were announced. Parker placed first. Thad Brown and Roger Murdock placed a distant second and third. That same day, General Worton notified the Police Commission that he wished to step down from his position at the end of the month. Legally, Mayor Bowron could select any of the top three candidates, but everyone knew that the choice was really between the two heavyweights, Brown or Parker. Both men now attempted to rally their allies. In Parker’s case, that meant the American Legion and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, including its new archbishop (soon to be cardinal), James Francis McIntyre. By 1948, there were 650,000 Roman Catholics in Los Angeles, and another 55,000 were arriving from across the country every year. Msgr. Thomas O’Dwyer, the top aide to Archbishop McIntyre, sent a pointed letter to Mayor Bowron, noting Parker’s many qualifications.

These were powerful backers, but Thad Brown, arguably, had even stronger allies. The LAPD had long been a strikingly Protestant organization: All but one of its previous chiefs had been Protestants. Almost all of them had also been Freemasons, as were many of the officers on the force. Brown was both. He also enjoyed the quiet support of the underworld. Thad Brown was in no way corrupt, but neither was he seen as a zealot who would attempt to eradicate the underworld altogether. The Los Angeles Times also supported Brown. In early August, it reported that three of the five Police Commissioners—clubwoman Agnes Albro, Henry Duque, and Bruno Newman—had settled on Brown. The Police Commission’s sole African American member, J. Alexander Somerville, and Irving Snyder, the commission’s Jewish member, supported Parker. Brown had the votes to become police chief—if he could keep them. For at that very moment, Agnes Albro was dying of breast cancer. Already, she was confined to bed. Brown’s supporters knew they needed to move quickly. Duque and Newman proposed to convene a meeting at Albro’s house to select Brown as chief. Parker vehemently objected. A meeting in a private residence would be illegal, he warned the commissioners, a clear violation of California’s open meeting requirements. Brown’s supporters paused. As they were debating the issue, Agnes Albro passed away.

The race was now a toss-up. “In the newspapers, it was a bigger story than baseball or the heat wave,” wrote one contemporary observer. “[T]he reporters smoked out secret meetings all through City Hall. Meetings between the Mayor and his Police Commissioners; between the Mayor and the candidates; between the commissioners and the candidates.”

On August 2, Mayor Bowron, General Worton, and the four members of the Police Commission sat down together. Exactly what was said was unclear, but after the meeting one of Thad Brown’s supporters decided to switch his support to Parker. (Many years later, Thad Brown would claim that he had withdrawn his name from consideration because he didn’t want “Bill Parker behind me, with his knife out.”) To send a message of strong support for the new chief, the sole remaining Brown holdout agreed to join the pro-Parker majority in order to make the vote unanimous. And so, later that very day, the Police Commission voted unanimously to make William H. Parker Los Angeles’s fortieth chief of police.

Mayor Bowron was notably lukewarm about their choice. When asked by a reporter if the appointment “met with his approval,” Bowron declined to answer, suggesting instead that “all statements should come from the Police Commission.”

Chief Parker waved off the mayor’s lack of support. “The action of the Police Commission this afternoon was gratifying and confirms my belief that the Chief of Police must be selected without political influence,” he told the press later that day.

The reality was otherwise. Parker had politicked—and prevailed. But many doubted that he would retain the position for very long.