by Jack Webb
Walker did a fast screening job, separating the phonies from the legitimate newsmen, and arranged interviews with eyewitnesses, policemen and even some of the injured children. At one point, officials of the Civil Aeronautics Board asked that all newspaper men be cleared from the schoolyard; and that was when the press knew, beyond all doubt, that he was really one of them. Walker turned down the government men.
Bluntly he pointed out that representatives of the two aircraft companies involved as well as other outsiders were being allowed into the disaster area. As far as he was concerned, the press should enjoy the same privileges. The request, he said, was the “stampede by government” which usually follows a disaster but is unnecessary and unfair to the public, which has the right to know.
So instead, he had a special section roped off for TV cameras and crews and provided floodlights for them. For the reporters and news photographers, he continued to supply leads and photo possibilities—and kept them close enough to the scene so that they could work.
Out of the coverage, two major gains, from the police point of view, were scored. First, the telecasts gave home viewers such a comprehensive picture of the disaster that the curiosity seekers stayed home and watched rather than jamming into the emergency area. And, through excellent photos and reportage, the press aroused a righteous public indignation against the folly of test flights over densely populated sections.
“I strongly feel that the press should cover all disasters first-hand and that there should be no hindrance whatever to such coverage,” Walker says.
In turn, the press is reciprocating. During the Mecca Bar investigation, they withheld much of what they knew at the request of the police. It was a painful responsibility, but they even passed up the page one story about the arrest of the first two suspects so the detectives could close in on the pair still at large.
That was just about the biggest bouquet a police reporter could hand Ed Walker.
THE DEPUTY CHIEF
WHEN WILLIAM H. PARKER BECAME CHIEF OF LAPD, he closed the door marked Assistant Chief and re-distributed top administrative responsibilities among a handful of Deputy Chiefs. There have been unkind suggestions that Parker felt one assistant might be tempted to take over the department, whereas with several deputies he could divide and rule unchallenged. Actually Parker was dividing LAPD into its basic, semi-independent divisions and recognizing merit. At the top of each division, as its supreme boss, he placed a “Chief” whose departmental record gave him clear title to the job.
All LAPD’s Chiefs began as rookies, sweated out the exams, the eligibility lists, the promotion lists, and then gradually became specialists. All are now potential candidates for Parker’s job; in fact one did serve as Chief before him and another lost out to Parker by the narrowest of margins. For a man who supposedly feared one assistant, Parker has rashly surrounded himself with no less than seven rivals. And they are expert.
Patrol Bureau. Half of LAPD’s manpower, some 2,200 men, patrol more than six million miles yearly by car, more than one hundred thousand miles afoot. They roll on half a million radio calls and make two hundred thousand arrests. Their Chief: Red-haired Frank E. Walton, a tough, determined officer who refused to let even the war hold back his police career. While serving as a Marine Intelligence officer in the Pacific, he wrote his exam for Lieutenant in a hut on Espiritu Santo and airmailed it back to Los Angeles.
Detective Bureau. Usually Patrol rolls first and makes the arrests, but it’s up to LAPD’s six hundred and fifty detectives to make them stand up in court. The record shows that they clean up ninety-five out of one hundred murders, sixty out of one hundred rapes, seventy out of one hundred aggravated assaults. Their Chief: Thad Brown, “the detective’s detective,” who has amassed forty-three official commendations during thirty-two years on the force. He is the Greenfield, Missouri, boy, ex-miner, ex-plasterer, who lost the No. 1 job to Parker by a squeaker.
Traffic Bureau . In a year, Angelenos drive the equivalent of four hundred thousand round trips around the earth. Their 1,300,000 registered vehicles would reach from Los Angeles to New York and back to Kansas City. They are probably the fastest drivers in the world because most of them live so far from work. And yet LAPD traffic men have made Los Angeles the safest big city in the country in movement of traffic. Their Chief: Harold W. Sullivan, a native Angeleno, amateur baseball statistician, who has been in Traffic since he was a sergeant.
Bureau of Corrections. Keeping the jails (a job LAPD doesn’t like to be saddled with) consumes twenty per cent of its budget and more than eight per cent of police manpower. Corrections handles one hundred thousand drunks yearly, plus another hundred thousand assorted offenders, who cost the city more than $3 daily per man. They serve more than a million mandays (which means some three and a quarter million meals) and tie up three hundred and seventy officers. Their Chief: scholarly Roger E. Murdock, red-haired Scotch-Irish university graduate, who teaches a course in Investigation of Major Crime at Los Angeles State College.
Personnel and Training. Cops don’t come off an assembly line. LAPD assigns eighty other officers to find them, sift them, mold them, fit them into the pattern. In a normal year, 3,836 will apply for the job of policeman. Ninety-seven make it. P-T’s human obstacle course of eighty trips up the rest. Their Chief: Lynn A. White, forty-five, Purple Heart Naval Commander, whose baby face made him the undercover scourge of the Los Angeles dope rings for years. His pride in P-T is this: “If we fail, the force fails. The department is only as good as the people we hire.”
Technical Services. It takes more than bone and tissue to run a police department. In LAPD’s massive Administration Building it also takes twenty-one miles of conduit, seventy-eight miles of wire, thirteen separate radio frequencies, five hundred telephones. But the electronic miracle does not throb without the bone and tissue, either. The department’s basic services are manned by a complement in blue of 179. Their Chief: droll, sage Arthur C. Hohmann, who at sixty-two looks back on thirty-four years of policing, including two years as Chief of Police. His epigram: “I’m not one of those guys who goes out and gets trophies and medals.”
Bureau of Administration. Who helps the Chief be Chief? In Los Angeles, it takes 168 men. They are the eyes and ears of the Chief of Police. They are Intelligence, IA, Ad Vice, Business Office, Public Information, and Planning & Research. From the blast of an irate citizen to the daily atomic radiation reading, the job gets done by the men of BA. Their Chief: Richard Simon, fifty-four, burly whip of the annual police budget and bureau commander since its origin in November, 1950. In his spare time, he teaches minority and other special police problems to a college class of peace officers, including Negroes. He tells them: “We ourselves are a minority group.”
These are the bones. Each Chiefs-eye view of his own job is different, but all of them at their lonely command desks have a common problem. Unlike most top executives in the outside world, they can’t just “think big” and deal in abstracts. Statistics tell a persuasive story, but one officer goofing off or a suicide in the jailhouse carries greater impact with the public. A Deputy Chief’s job is schizophrenic. He must see all divisions in his command together and separately.
Try these for specifics.
II
When Deputy Chief Frank Walton made up his mind that his career would be law enforcement, he swore off smoking. “If you are on a stakeout and have a quick cigarette,” he explains, “you can’t hide the odor of the smoke. Your suspect will know you are around.” That’s the specific approach to a police problem.
And his uniformed men deal in the specifics of crime. Detectives catch the headlines, but the patrolman catches the crook: the hoodlum prowling the quiet neighborhood, the stickup man backing out of a liquor store, the switchblade knifer standing over a body, the burglar leaping backyard fences.
The night Officers R. J May and J. D. Reardon were riding radio in the Hollywood Division, the problem was specific. A bandit-rapist had been terrorizin
g young couples in lover’s lanes, leaving behind only one clue. Two illuminated dials on his auto dashboard glowed red. Just after dark this night, police had stopped and examined more than one hundred cars looking for the telltale red dash lights, but without success.
Now a radio alert told May and Reardon that an eight-year-old green coupe, possibly a Ford, was believed headed toward Los Angeles from a stickup at Redondo Beach. Reardon was driving; so May jotted down a description of the car.
Two hours later, driving south on Vermont Avenue at the eastern fringe of Hollywood, they spotted the old coupe coming toward them. Reardon radioed for reinforcements and U-turned to follow. The coupe driver spotted them, too. He drove into a darkened gas station, then backtracked south on Vermont. The officers turned and followed.
For a mile and a half, from Sunset Boulevard to Beverly, the chase roared on, and then the green coupe broke right through a blockade set up by other police cars. Reardon followed, and when the coupe crashed, he and his partner collared two fugitives.
Very specific. One proved to be the so-called “red-light bandit,” the notorious Caryl Whitman Chessman, subsequently convicted on seventeen counts of robbery, kidnapping with bodily harm, sexual perversion, and attempted rape. Chessman went on to make legal history by successfully staving off his death sentence for years through a prolonged court maneuvering.
Specifics.
In the dull and stately phraseology affected by policemen, the report begins, “While on routine patrol…” And then are detailed the specifics that Frank Walton’s men grapple with daily as each rides forty miles of street, three square miles in area, charged with the protection of fifteen thousand citizens and taxpayers.
Officers Jack T. Smith and Eugene Dossi question two suspicious youths on the street, find they are carrying pliers, a flashlight, and a master key marked, “Do Not Take From Office.” Thus, they end an outbreak of schoolhouse burglaries in the Harbor Division.
Officers Garth Ward and Warner Chinnis are routinely patrolling in University Division, but not too routinely to overlook the two cars which park side by side as the drivers engage in brief, whispered conversation. They tail one car —and then, before their night watch has ended, they serve warrants; search apartments; confiscate narcotics, needles, and burnt spoons used by heroin addicts; and arrest several men and women.
The placid routine of patrol may be interrupted by a teletyped All Points Bulletin from another city, or by the most ancient form of police communications, the anguished cry of “Police!”
At roll call on the day watch one morning, Officers M. E. Buckner and S. Trypak memorized the teletyped APB from San Francisco, describing two men who had slugged a policeman there and fled by car. Five hours later, Buckner and Trypak bagged the pair five miles from downtown Los Angeles.
Officers J. M. Noonan and F. A. Sylvester dutifully stopped for a red traffic light about ten o’clock one night in the University area. From a nearby beauty shop, they heard muffled cries for help. They found an employee struggling with a stickup man. They captured him and got evidence resulting in two more arrests. In less than thirty-six hours, the gang had pulled five stickups.
Not all the patrol is routinely pursued by land. On night watch on LAPD’s police boat, Officers Robert O. Ernst and John S. Gable received a radio command to find a twenty-seven-foot power cruiser reported operating erratically and without running or clearance lights.
Along with boats from the Los Angeles Harbor Department, the Fire Department, and the Coast Guard, Ernst and Gable set off in pursuit. Two high-tonnage vessels were maneuvering in the harbor turning basin, and the pursuers had to pilot skillfully around them. The errant cruiser ahead poured on its power and tried to shake off the chase.
But the police boat pulled alongside, one of the officers leaped aboard the cruiser, and there was a tussle for control of the wheel. The pilot suddenly revved up his engine and veered sharply. He couldn’t shake off the policeman. He was escorted to Harbor Division headquarters and held as a drunken boat driver.
Specifics.
As boss of patrol in the nation’s third largest city, Frank Walton has his nose buried deep in such reports day after day. Yet, there is the other side of the job, too; the generalship, the staff work, which must place the men in the field where they are needed and when they are needed.
Walton was borrowed by the City of Chicago in the late 1940’s to help overhaul its police department and then came home to revamp the training program of LAPD’s Police Academy. After that, he got around to a revolutionary but scientifically plotted redeployment of every LAPD man in uniform.
Once policemen were shuffled around Los Angeles by rule of thumb. What this meant, in practice, was that the divisional captain who beefed the loudest, the civic representatives who pulled the most weight, got the most policemen for their districts. Some quiet neighborhoods beset chiefly by bicycle thieves were over-policed while areas roaring with mayhem remained badly under-manned.
With the help of LAPD’s research specialists, Chief Walton amassed all the important crime and population statistics of Los Angeles and then broke them down by police divisions. The results were startling, even to Walton.
The Wilshire Division, covering a fashionable, well-to-do and peaceful neighborhood, policed an area with the second highest population percentage in the city. But, the crime statistics disclosed, Wilshire didn’t require many uniformed men per capita. It rated only fifth in the amount of overall crime, so under Walton’s reapportionment program, Wilshire got 123 men for patrol, which made it the fifth largest divisional force in the city.
On the other hand, Central, LAPD’s incorrigible problem child, was jumping with trouble.
Though less than five and a half per cent of the city’s six thousand miles of streets ran through the division, Central regularly piled up the highest percentage of injuries and fatalities in traffic accidents.
And though its population rated only sixth, its crime percentage figures led all other divisions in everything: in percentage of both adult and juvenile felony arrests; radio calls and time consumed answering radio calls; property loss from crimes, robberies, burglaries; felonious assaults; larcenies; murders; auto thefts; and burglaries, thefts from autos.
Chief Walton promptly beefed up the Central Division with 263 men, the highest percentage of the patrol force. Similarly, he allotted manpower to the other divisions on the basis of their qualitative needs, rather than by head count. No divisional commander or neighborhood leader could quarrel with percentage points.
Ideally patrolmen should spend seventy-five per cent of their time on patrol and twenty-five per cent “off the air” in making arrests or investigating calls from citizens. But Los Angeles’ enormous population increase has far outdistanced police manpower and cruelly increased every policeman’s workload. In a city of two and a half million, LAPD is virtually a “vest pocket” police force.
To combat the personnel shortage, Chief Walton has further refined his techniques for anticipating where his men will be wanted and at what hour of the day or night.
First, he studied the New York City experiment in slugging crime to death. In a saturation program, New York poured a task force of two hundred policemen into one small district and virtually overwhelmed the criminals. Within a short period, the crime rate plummeted amazingly. But the situation there was different. With a little more than three times the population of Los Angeles, New York had almost six times as many policemen. Walton just couldn’t spare the men for such a frontal assault.
Instead, he again attacked with research and slide rule. LAPD analysts made a statistical examination of all divisions and ascertained for each the square mile—“the crime mile,” they called it—which had the highest incidence of trouble.
In addition, they pinpointed the period of high frequency along “crime mile.”
In one division, trouble time was from seven o’clock at night until three in the morning. Ten two-man radio cars and two
sergeants were then assigned during those hours to the “crime mile.” They questioned suspicious characters, issued traffic citations, shook down vehicles. Most of all, they made themselves conspicuous. Trouble makers knew they were around.
Officers worked “the crime miles” on a two-weeks trial basis. After that, they might return for a few days or even a few hours. Because LAPD was under-staffed, they had to hit Hollywood for four hours, then move over to the Valley for the same amount of time. It was a sketchy, flying-squad assignment, but the results were immediate.
In one division, the area of high frequency crime cooled down within days. In another, the mobile force of twenty-two men served $8,000 worth of traffic warrants in five days. A section of Hollywood which had become infested with purse snatchers did not record a single complaint for a month after the “crime mile” operation.
Whatever the specific problem, the technique seemed to work, whether impulsive or planned crime was involved. Thus, in neighborhoods marked by street fights and ginmill brawls, the mere show of the uniform had a quieting effect. On the other hand, in a downtown loft district, the flying squads put an end to an outbreak of garment-factory burglaries and caught a “phantom” second-story man who had long been pestering the division.
To Walton, “crime mile” achieved two purposes. Divisional commanders received sudden, strong reinforcements in their fight against increasing crime. And the overall results dramatized what LAPD could really accomplish, given an adequate patrol force.
But Chief Walton operates under no delusion that he is going to get all the men he needs. He can’t even get enough facilities. For example, the Patrol Bureau, which is also charged with control of juvenile delinquency, must on occasion turn loose young hoodlums because there just is no place to detain them.