The Badge

by Jack Webb

  Yet McQuown learned to respect the Negro for his bravery, humor, and kindness, and it bothered him that out of his frequent transactions with the police, the Negro had developed a persecution complex. Often when he was arrested, he complained that he was being charged only because of the color of his skin. To peace officers everywhere, the assertion is familiar, and most policemen ignore it. McQuown felt the charge had been ignored too long.

  So he devised a patient explanation for every prisoner who raised the issue. Before knowing who had committed a specific crime, the policeman had known only that a crime had been committed. His sole objective was to catch the criminal, and if he happened to be Negro, that was just the way it turned out. Had he been white, he would have been treated the same. To Negro motorists, he explained the policeman hadn’t known a Negro was driving. He had chased and stopped a speeding car.

  The simple, sincere logic of the argument impressed Negroes throughout the Division and eased relations with the police. Once they felt assurance that they were not victims of discrimination, they were willing to accept justice. McQuown’s philosophy interested various civic groups working for minority welfare, and soon he was addressing meetings all over town on the subject of the police and race relations.

  Chief Parker spotted him as the man to handle a critical and growing problem. He sent McQuown to Chicago to take a special course in police-minority work and, when he returned, told him to revise the Police Academy curriculum.

  Today LAPD emphasizes to its rookies that there are only two methods by which the laws and regulations can be carried out in the field. The first is to understand the people and the reasons behind their actions. The second is to try to enforce the Department’s own standards on others. LAPD does not tolerate the second approach. Police can be neither judges nor prosecutors, McQuown says. “We are apprehenders—and that’s all we are.”

  McQuown had been serving about a year as LAPD’s No. One authority on race relations when he met his first serious test.

  For some time there had been agitation over reported real estate discrimination against Negroes in nearby Compton. McQuown knew that the bad feeling would probably spill over into Los Angeles in the homes bordering that town. The junior high school drew students, white and Negro, from the area, and was already a racial sore spot. In only eight years, the southern section of Los Angeles which it served had changed from eighty-five per cent white population to eighty-five per cent Negro. The remaining whites felt beleaguered and hostile to their new neighbors.

  Under those conditions, almost anything, a schoolboy fight at recess, a rumor, even one insulting word, could touch off the trouble. Unfortunately for the school, three unrelated episodes which no one could have foreseen combined to give Los Angeles its worst experience with juvenile hate and prejudice.

  First, a veteran official at the school who was aware of its background of racial tensions was promoted out of the district. The new administrator—on the job only two days— was unfamiliar with the situation. Second, after a long period of confinement in an institution, a mentally disturbed Negro boy was returned to the school and in his first two days back got into three fights.

  Now gangs were formed on basis of race and extended challenges to each other for all-out combat. As they were preparing for action, a Negro boy playing on the railroad tracks was killed by a train. Rumor swept the school corridors that actually a gang of white boys had pushed him to his death.

  That did it; and, before the new vice principal could act, gang fights broke out sporadically all over the area. When police patrol cars arrived, they found almost three hundred boys arrayed for battle. The area was close to a major race riot.

  Quickly the officers scattered the youths in all directions and seized the ringleaders of both races. But it was only stopgap action, and McQuown moved in with both an emergency program and some long-range ideas.

  To handle the immediate crisis, he persuaded school officials to stagger class dismissals at 1:30 p.m., 2 p.m., 2:30 p.m. and 3 o’clock. Both before and after sessions, he had five police cars assigned to patrol duty in the area. When strange youths infiltrated the neighborhood “to watch the fun” (including one caravan of twelve cars), he asked all nearby schools to restrain their students.

  But the underlying tensions persisted, and McQuown knew that these could be resolved only by the community and the students themselves. LAPD called a meeting of the ringleaders and laid it on the line. There must be no more violence. Further, it was suggested, some of the school’s promising athletes might fail to win scholarships if the school became tabbed with a “race” reputation.

  Then LAPD officers visited the parents, asking their cooperation, and checked how many of their sons had previously got into trouble. Those with records were put back under the calming influence of their old probation officers.

  McQuown also appealed for intervention by community organizations, which should have been the deciding factor. Unfortunately, because of the population upheaval, most of these clubs and groups had been badly weakened, and the job came back to the police. “We were teaching these people to live with each other,” McQuown recalls.

  But he got one break. The school’s best athletes, worried about their chances of scholarships, began to talk openly against race hate. Their prestige carried weight, and soon other youngsters were anonymously tipping off LAPD whenever trouble loomed. To save face, they had to accompany their own gangs to the battlefields and then flee at the sight of the waiting police. But they wanted the officers to know that a lot of the fellows were sick of the whole thing.

  At last the calls stopped. There were no more brawls, real or rumored. Negro and white were getting along with each other, perhaps better than before the trouble, because both sides were secretly ashamed. It had taken weeks, but McQuown had achieved success in the new variation of an old police function. He had kept the peace between the races.

  III

  For many years LAPD and the Los Angeles newspapers were joined in the trying bonds of Jiggs-and-Maggie wedlock. The police had to use the press to communicate with the public. Often publicity facilitated identifications of the dead, located the missing, and brought forth key witnesses. In turn, the newspapers relied on LAPD for some of the most fascinating stories in their news columns; and, in the robust old days of the circulation wars, a good police scoop meant thousands of additional street sales.

  But by the very nature of the jobs, the partners were incompatible. To the policeman, the crime reporter was a ferret stirring up trouble, because police business was essentially confidential business. To this day, detectives in LAPD blame meddling by the press for their failure to solve the Black Dahlia torture murder. In turn, the police reporter, Headquarters man and district legman alike, charged that police stupidity and/or stubbornness deprived them of legitimate, public news.

  Under Chief Parker, the press recognized, LAPD was conscientiously trying to root out many old inefficiencies and abuses; and yet, curiously, press-police relations dropped to a new low during the early years of the Parker regime. When the “police brutality” scandal broke, all the papers lambasted him and, pointing out that the average Los Angeles Chief lasts two years in office, gleefully noted Parker had been in for nineteen months. The Los Angeles Herald & Express quoted “well-informed politicians” as saying that Parker had become the favorite Los Angeles sport—“They’re shooting at him.”

  An honest career cop doesn’t make Chief by turning the other cheek, and usually Parker gave back as good as he got, which did not sweeten the relations. Once he even broke up the non-stop poker game in the City Hall Press Room which newsmen considered perilously close to infringing on the Bill of Rights. Parker blamed the intrusion of “outside elements” into the game, but the press considered it petty reprisal. At two a.m. one day, they hung a funeral wreath on his office door and then decided to take photographs of it. But when a team of photographers returned, Parker’s security patrol had already spotted and removed
it. The press was more enraged than ever.

  Actually, press relations (including radio and TV as well as the newspapers) should have almost top priority with any police department because they are essentially community relations. (The ex-newspaperman who handles press liaison for the New York City Police Department carries the title of Deputy Commissioner in Charge of Community Relations.) From minimizing stories of racial friction to withholding vital information during the search for a fugitive, the press can be, and must be, an invaluable police ally and helpmate.

  In Los Angeles, it took a train wreck to salvage the almost broken marriage.

  On an early January night, a sixty-one-year-old engineer was pushing the two-car San Diegan of the Santa Fe Railroad south out of the yards. As he neared the six-degree bend in the track, he was doing almost seventy, but a strange optical delusion had seized him. Looking for the speed-limit markers, he saw “orange trees” (they were really boxcars), and he didn’t slam on the “big hold,” the emergency brake, till the train was already shimmying. In the crash, twenty-nine persons were killed and one hundred and forty-six injured.

  Through “Sigalert” communications, LAPD poured everything into the thickly populated section south of the downtown district: doctors, nurses, ambulances, emergency vehicles, policemen, firemen, deputy sheriffs. Their job was threefold: save lives and care for the injured; isolate the disaster scene; remove unauthorized persons from the area.

  Unfortunately, before a police command post could seal off the area of several square blocks, curiosity seekers by the thousands had swarmed in. They interfered with rescue work, delayed the righting of the overturned cars, blocked the traffic routes used by emergency vehicles. Ambulances loaded with the injured had to fight their way through.

  But when the police did clear the wreck scene, reporters and photographers got the brush along with everybody else. “You’re just the press,” one reporter was told as the police shoved him back. Another newsman belted an officer on the jaw and yelled, “If you want me out of here, you’ll have to carry me out.” In the shoving confusion, reporters lost their hats and stories, photographers almost had their cameras broken.

  Next day newspaper editorials denounced the police action, and some even demanded that Parker resign. Again, Parker fought back: in forty-five minutes, all one hundred and forty-six injured had been extricated and placed in ambulances. Their personal property had been safeguarded, and police had preserved the tachometer in the engine cab which showed the speed at the time of the crash.

  “There were people all over the place with shiny sheriff’s badges,” he said, defending the manhandling of the press. “The place was lousy with them. Many times the officers had no time to stop and ascertain whether the wearer had the authority to have such a badge.”

  But this time the press would not be turned aside.

  As Los Angeles daily papers steamed with inflamed, accusing headlines of police inefficiency and maltreatment, the Police Commission waded into the battle. It stood as a buffer between public and police.

  For several days, a stream of nearly seventy-five witnesses representing all law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County paraded through the Commission’s chambers to give testimony on the Santa Fe wreck hassle.

  It soon became apparent that what had been sorely lacking was a steadying, coordinating hand between press and lawmen at the scene of the disaster.

  At a reconciliation session, both sides agreed that a press liaison officer should be named to facilitate newsgathering at all hours, on all stories, under any circumstances. Further, he would have to appreciate the points of conflict between press and police and command sufficient departmental stature to assure the respect of the press and the obedience of the police.

  From his own staff, Parker produced Inspector Edward Walker, a big, tough, soft-spoken, native Angeleno. He knew practically nothing about the complexities of newspaper operation, but after nineteen years on LAPD, he did know cops and newspapermen. And, as it turned out, he had some surprisingly uncoplike ideas about the handling of news stories.

  Like race relations, LAPD would now recognize press— or community—relations at the inspector’s level of command and permit one of its $12,000-a-year top men to give full time to bettering them.

  In the new LAPD building, newsmen found they were being installed in large, airy quarters equipped with the same office furniture used by the police. Every newspaper and wire service represented on the police beat received its own desk, typewriter and six-way radio-phone. Thus, the newsmen were tied into all law enforcement radios in the county, plus fire and civilian defense communications and LAPD’s own intra-departmental phone system.

  Thus far, fine. But the skeptical reporters were still waiting to see how Walker would operate on the first big news break. Would all the nice promises be realized—or would he go cop on them?

  When it broke, it was one of those cockeyed Hollywood stories that excite the reporters, delight the public, and harass the police. LAPD got the flash at one a.m., and roused Ed Walker. Before he had gulped down a cup of coffee, newspapers were calling him from New York, Toronto, London.

  Walker groaned. From long experience, he knew how the reporters and photogs would roll on this one, and he raced to the early American home in San Fernando Valley to head them off. He had just two thoughts in mind: to placate the press by giving them as much leeway as he could, and yet, as a policeman, to protect the evidence, if any. The report said: Marie (The Body) McDonald has been kidnapped.

  To this day, no one, including LAPD, knows exactly what did happen, but there is general agreement that Walker did his part. He allowed both reporters and photographers liberal run of the McDonald home, but to save the detectives on the case from utter distraction, emphasized that all police information would clear through him alone.

  The following night, Marie turned up, bruised and hysterical, alongside a desert road about two hundred miles south of Los Angeles. She said two men had kidnapped her, apparently for an insignificant amount of ransom; had telephoned her mother reassuringly that she would not be harmed; then finally had released her. To quiet doubters, she agreed to a re-enactment in her home, and once again Walker had a problem.

  To him, reenactments were nothing new. LAPD had been filming them for more than a decade both to give detectives a better visualization of the case and to keep a permanent record. But when the reporters saw three investigators and two technicians enter the McDonald home with a tape recorder, a 16-mm camera, and twelve hundred feet of film, there was another outburst of excitement. They wanted in, too.

  To keep them from interfering with the filming, Walker had a loudspeaker hooked up outside the house where all the press could listen. Inside, an officer with a walkie-talkie fed a running account of the re-enactment into the speaker. That worked fine till a friend of Marie, a local TV newscaster, phoned her direct and asked if he couldn’t come in.

  Sure, Marie said, not clearing it with Walker, and the rest of the press revolted. Walker had to step in then in their behalf and get most of them into the house, too.

  “It was a wild scene,” he says quietly today.

  Next day there was another snafu. Reporters had just discovered that Michael Wilding, the actor, had been at the house during the re-enactment. Why, they demanded of Walker, hadn’t they been told? Wilding had been available, Walker said tartly, but in their own excitement, they had overlooked him. The press accepted the rebuke.

  Ed Walker knows that, like the police, the press are fundamentally interested in good police enforcement and, given the opportunity, will cooperate. Thus, LAPD radio code “20” was born. The number alerts news photographers to the locations where good crime or traffic photos can be made. “We encourage the press to take spectacular pictures, especially in traffic accident cases,” Walker explains. “It might help to slow down the next guy.”

  So far as he is concerned, the press can enter into any dangerous police situation at its own risk, af
ter being warned of the possible risks. Photographers have even been allowed into burning buildings. And since the Sante Fe wreck, where photos of the mutilated bodies were forbidden, police have been ordered to forego censorship of any kind. LAPD leaves it to the judgment and good taste of newspaper editors to pass on the photos considered fit to print.

  After the Mecca Bar fire, the Mirror-News front-paged a photo of the burned corpse on the bar stool. The shot shocked Los Angeles, but more than anything else, brought home to the public the full horror of the tragedy.

  As Walker sees his job, he is the middleman between crime and the public and, short of destroying evidence, he wants to let the press make its report in full. On one occasion, a second-hand dealer was found stabbed to death in his store, his body awkwardly jackknifed behind a narrow counter piled high with merchandise. Few detectives would have allowed the photographers inside. Walker directed that, one by one, the photographers squeeze into the tiny passage behind the counter, take their shots and leave. The evidence remained undisturbed.

  Again, when an F-89J jet and a DC-7B transport, both on test flights, collided high over San Fernando Valley, Walker came through for his charges. Not only were five airmen killed, but the wreckage of the transport slammed into the crowded playground of a junior high school at the northern end of the Valley. Three students were killed, and more than seventy were injured.

  Again, there was confusion, as at the scene of the Santa Fe wreck, as parents and passers-by by the hundreds stampeded to the playground. But this time Walker was one of the first officers to appear, and he ordered every policeman to refer to him, without any argument, persons without credentials who claimed to be from the press.