L.A. Noir (45 page)

In the African American press, story after story chronicled the indignities. “
EVERY NEGRO A SUSPECT
,” screamed the
California Eagle
in a March 20, 1947, article on the police hunt for a pair of men who’d shot two police officers over the course of the preceding weekend. A shooting was, of course, a serious matter, but the police response was indiscriminate. “No Negro, no matter how little he fitted the description of the two fugitives, was immune from police search and question,” continued the paper bitterly. Every few months, the paper would carry a horrifying story about a black man—or a black woman—who had suffered insult, if not assault, at the hands of the police.

“With the death this week of Dan Jense, a cafe owner who was brutally beaten by police in the course of a raid on his establishment, the spotlight shifts to police brutality and brings into focus the repeated complaints which have come out of minority communities for the past several years,” wrote the
Eagle
in June 1949. But of course, the mainstream press didn’t shift its attention to police brutality. Neither did the city’s politicians. “Mayor Bowron has steadfastly defended the police in every reported incident of brutality,” the
Eagle
lamented.

“The cold-blooded killing of August Salcido and the fatal beating of Herman Burns, climaxed the uninhibited ‘legal lynching’ campaign of terror that the police department has been carrying on against Negroes and Mexicans for some time,” opined the paper on another occasion:

The steps the mayor had taken, the paper continued, such as appointing an African American to monitor allegations of brutality, were little more than “window-dressing.” With scandal again threatening the department’s leadership, the paper foresaw “token raids” to divert attention from the main action.

“Any so-called ‘clean-up’ on the East Side [meaning east of Main Street] would be in reality a cover-up for a campaign of intimidation and police terrorism,” the paper heatedly concluded.

To nonblacks, such accounts were easy to dismiss. The outspoken publisher of the
Eagle
, Charlotta Bass, was, if not a Communist, then at the very least a fellow traveler. Moreover, police department investigations rarely substantiated these dramatic tales of wrongdoing. Indeed, some proved so frivolous that the police department began to urge prosecutors to charge people who brought unwarranted complaints against the department with making false statements about the police. Even black Angelenos were sometimes skeptical of the
Eagle
, preferring instead the more conservative
Sentinel
. But the
Sentinel
, too, was replete with stories of black men and women going about their business and running afoul of the police. To African Americans, the sheer accumulation of anecdotes was compelling. White residents rarely heard or read about these stories.

      AS THE HEAD of internal affairs, Bill Parker might have been expected to take a stance on such issues, but there’s no evidence he did. Instead, Parker focused almost exclusively on corruption and the underworld. Yet there is reason to believe that Parker was initially seen as something of a progressive on race relations. The two commissioners who initially supported Parker for chief were Irving Snyder, who was Jewish, and Dr. J. Alexander Somerville, who was African American. Presumably, these men saw Parker as a fair-minded individual. The second reason for believing Parker would be fair-minded arose from his treatment of African American policewoman Vivian Strange.

When he was sworn in as chief, Parker made a striking promise to the rank and file: When it came to promotions, he would always pick the person at the top of the civil service eligibility list. The first test of this policy came almost immediately, when Strange became eligible to make sergeant, a rank that no African American woman had ever before attained. Strange was not popular in the department, where she had a reputation as someone who “hated” white people so much that she wouldn’t ride in the same car with them. Fifty years after her promotion to sergeant, one senior LAPD commander described her as “a bitch.”

Strange may (or may not) have been an unpleasant person; however, she clearly understood something that the department’s white officers did not—namely, that a black woman in a car with a white man in south Los Angeles was likely to be seen as a prostitute. Insisting on driving herself to meetings in African American neighborhoods wasn’t standoffish; it was an attempt to avoid humiliation. Whatever her personality, Parker did not hesitate when her name came up on the sergeant eligibility list. That November, he made Strange the LAPD’s first female African American sergeant.

But those who hoped for further steps toward equality were disappointed. Parker did not change the department’s unstated policy of not placing black officers in positions of command over white officers. He also dismissed the idea that the LAPD had a race-relations problem. In a March 11, 1953, letter to a resident who had written Mayor Bowron to complain about police abuse, Parker presented a rebuttal noting that over the course of the year 1952, the LAPD had received 1,068 complaints. During that same period, his letter continued, the department had made “a minimum of 1,741,860 contacts.” In other words, .0006 of the officer contacts had resulted in complaints. Of those, “259 (or 24.3 percent) were substantiated and resulted in disciplinary action…. A total of 116 official reprimands were issued, 126 officers received a total of 1,453 days suspension…. Sixteen officers were terminated from the Department.” To Parker, the conclusion was clear: Police misconduct was exceedingly rare, and on those occasions where misconduct did occur, it was severely punished. The possibility that the department’s statistics might mislead—that complaints were discouraged, that communities of color might have become inured to behavior that would have generated waves of complaints in whiter, more affluent parts of town—was something Parker does not appear to have considered.

This represented a failure of imagination. Yet to his credit, when the facts were clear, Parker followed them to their logical conclusion. In mid-1953, Los Angeles lurched into an antigang hysteria after a group of young thugs robbed and killed a pedestrian downtown. “Rat Packs Attack,” screamed the newspapers; columnists demanded that the police department hit back, often in strikingly intemperate ways. (One newspaper editorial called on the department to prevent crime by using “clubs and mailed fists”—this less than two years after the “Bloody Christmas” beatings.) Much of the public anger had a decidedly anti-Hispanic tone. Parker would have none of it. In response to an inquiry from the grand jury, Parker calmly refused to treat a lone incident as a deadly trend.

“The local juvenile gang problem is not new to this community, but has its roots deep in the social and economic make-up of this area,” Parker wrote back to jury foreman Don Thompson. “The recent incidents which have unfortunately been so spectacularly reported have created a wave of hysteria, not a crime wave. Most ethnic groups at one time or another have had confused generations which physically displayed their resentment toward society. The best methods of integrating these groups into our society are well known. Those methods will solve the present problem, if citizens will continue to apply them.”

To Parker, race relations were first and foremost a technical problem.
The appropriate response was to deploy skilled public relations officers, officers like one African American officer who had caught Parker’s attention—Officer Tom Bradley, the same Tom Bradley who would later become Los Angeles’s first African American mayor.

      IN 1955, Tom Bradley was one of the LAPD’s most promising African American officers. His rise had been remarkable. Bradley’s parents were sharecroppers, Texas-born, who arrived in Los Angeles in 1924 with their seven-year-old son. Tom’s father, Lee Bradley, soon found a job as a porter for the Santa Fe railroad. His mother, Crenner, devoted herself to the education of their son, maneuvering Bradley into the Polytechnic high school, a predominantly white institution known for its excellent athletics and strong academics. Tall, handsome, and fast, Tom Bradley excelled at both. Upon graduating, he won a track scholarship to UCLA. But after meeting Ethel Arnold (a beauty whom the
L.A. Tribune
would later describe as “the community’s prettiest girl”), Bradley decided he wanted to get married. That meant he needed a job. So, during his junior year, Bradley decided to apply to become a police officer. His score on the civil service test was high, and in 1940, he joined the LAPD.

Bradley got the kind of assignments that black officers typically do—in his instance, a position in the Newton Division vice squad. His work there on a bookmaking case in 1950 caught Parker’s eye. So too did his efforts to promote the department in the local press. By the autumn of 1953, Bradley was writing a regular “Police-Eye View” column for the
California Eagle
. His articles were perfectly crafted to win Parker’s approval. An October 22, 1953, piece on the Police Commission described it, reverentially, as “one of the most powerful agencies of our government.” This was a favorite fiction of the chief; every informed observer of Los Angeles politics knew that the Police Commission was little more than a rubber stamp. Still, it was a useful stance when the department came under Political attack. Bradley also took on the department’s critics in print. A January 28, 1954, column addressed the volatile issue of residents being stopped and questioned by the police. Bradley defended the practice, noting that police officers often had information that motivated the stop. Such efforts endeared him to Chief Parker. In early 1955, Parker approved Bradley’s request to move to a new community relations unit. Bradley threw himself into the work with commendable zeal. In short order, he had become a member of more than 120 social, fraternal, and business groups.

Although Parker was impressed by Bradley’s work, his apologetics for Chief Parker and the department met with skepticism in much of the black
community. “Instead of decent human relations based on mutual respect and a negation of false and arbitrary barriers, Parker gives us the 20th century antibiotic, public relations,” complained the editorial board of another African American newspaper, the
Los Angeles Tribune
, in early 1955.

African Americans were particularly upset by the police department’s failure to integrate the force more aggressively. In late 1955, fire department chief John Alderson was removed from office for his point-blank refusal to integrate the fire department. Tellingly, Parker seemed to view the attempt to integrate the fire department as a quasi-subversive campaign: Intelligence division officers were sent to observe city council sessions on the issue. But when the police were confronted with similar demands, Parker maintained that LAPD was—and long had been—integrated.

Civil rights leaders thought differently.

Critics of the department noted that 60 percent of the department’s 122 “active Negro personnel” were deployed to Newton and 77th Street Divisions, the two “black” divisions. Black officers were effectively excluded from other parts of the city and from many of the department’s most desirable assignments.

“The Police of Los Angeles fall just a stone’s throw short of being as Jim Crow as if the department were situated in the heart of Georgia, rather than California,” declared the
Tribune
, somewhat melodramatically, in a February 1955 editorial.
^*

Despite such sniping, Parker seemed to value the job Bradley was doing. In the fall of 1958, Chief Parker personally called Bradley’s home to inform him that he’d made lieutenant, only the third African American lieutenant in the history of the force.

But Bill Parker was not the trusting sort. After a series of negative articles about the department appeared in the
L.A. Sentinel
, Parker decided to take a closer look at the performance of his top community liaison officer, and so he instructed the intelligence division to put Bradley under observation. Daryl Gates was with the chief when the intelligence report came back.

“Parker told me the report said that Bradley, instead of talking the department up, was providing negative information to dissident groups, saying
unfavorable things about Parker and the LAPD,” wrote Gates in his memoirs. “That changed Parker’s view of him just like that. Bradley, he fumed, was an absolute traitor to the department.”

What was the nature of Bradley’s transgression? While the exact offense is unknown, a 1961 intelligence division report on Bradley’s appearance at a meeting sponsored by the ACLU at a private residence at 16916 San Fernando Road provides a flavor of his comments: