by Jack Webb
Murdock’s investigation established that the police had not known of the woman’s suicidal tendencies. She had been drunk and wearing only the robe (to which the cord was sewn) when she was arrested.
Since the cord could not be detached, matrons went to get jail clothes for her; and, during an unguarded five minutes, she managed to tie one end around her neck and the other to the cell bars.
Such tragedies, even though Corrections is exonerated, increase Murdock’s distaste for a job that doesn’t properly belong to the police. And Chief Parker agrees.
“The identification of police with the processes of punishment works to destroy the ideal of a non-judging, non-penalizing police,” Parker says. “The detention of sentenced prisoners by the police is a dangerous violation of the democratic theory of law enforcement.”
Specifics.
THE CHIEF
SOMEHOW, BY THE VERY NATURE OF HIS WORK, whether it is a warning, an arrest or a death notification to a home, the policeman is always an intruder. Always, it seems, he makes the last knock on the door, the last phone call, the last command. As the fortieth Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, William Henry Parker symbolizes all of this—the intrusion, the authority, the finality—which distinguishes the peace officer from the civilian, and in behalf of his 4,400 men he bears the brunt of the fears and resentments which the public feels toward the policeman.
In his first seven years in office, the newspapers prematurely buried Parker seven times; and he has been verbally attacked by politicians, minorities spokesmen, and civil liberties defenders. He has twice been marked for assassination by gun and bomb. For years his wife has been subjected to anonymous, harassing phone calls at their home. Attempts have been made to “get” him legally through lawsuits; at one time he and LAPD faced a variety of damage actions totaling almost fifteen million dollars.
Chief Parker is not the kind of civil servant who complains about the hours and pay, though it is generally accepted that he could do twice as well in private industry. For twenty-three years and one day, an honest and efficient officer in a department that was often notoriously dishonest and inefficient, he worked toward his goal, and no distraction, threat, or temptation, is going to dislodge him now.
In a momentary mood of frustration, he will say that no policeman in his right mind should accept the job of Chief unless he is ready to retire, but immediately dismissing the distasteful thought, he plunges back into the counter-attack. He has fought the newspapers and politicians, harassed gangsters and Communists, opposed racial pressures on the police, and tangled with his own district attorney. Recently he has broadened his target range to include the California State Supreme Court and the California State Legislature. Whether his views are asked or not, he expresses them bluntly on any controversial subject involving law enforcement which may range from proposed legalized gambling to the increasing legal restraints on police activity.
For the most part, those who opposed him in the past now respect his utter dedication to his job. Though they may question some of his approaches, they acknowledge that he is cop, pure cop, twenty-four hours a day; and they worry not so much about Parker as about the precedents Parker sets.
Thus, a lawyer suing as a taxpayer asserted that the Department’s use of listening devices to record conversations was a “shocking trespass” when done without search warrant. He thought taxpayers should be permitted to sue the police, explaining:
“Chief Parker, the respondent in this case, is doubtless acting in good faith when he orders installation of electronic machines to obtain evidence. But Parker won’t be Chief forever. If we do not give the citizen greater powers to protect himself, future police enforcers might conceivably misuse these devices.”
Though he is a lawyer himself, Parker reacts with the baffled frustration of an honest layman caught in legal toils when such arguments are advanced against him.
Under attack, he knows how to counter-punch. When he is enmeshed in legal niceties involving wire taps and search-and-seizure, he chafes impatiently: “The voice of the criminal, the Communist, and the self-appointed defender of civil liberties cries out for more and more restrictions upon police authority.”
If attacked on the sensitive minority issue, particularly for tagging criminals by race, color, and creed, he answers back: “We are all members of some minority group.” Such labels, he insists stubbornly, are the very basis of identification, and identification is an indispensable police tool. At Louisville, Kentucky, he once encouraged the Southern Police Institute to resist “undue pressures” by minority groups. “Such demands are a form of discrimination against the public as a whole,” Parker said bluntly.
Considering that at various times he has incurred opposition from almost every vocal group in Los Angeles, Parker’s survival is a comforting example of municipal intelligence. Despite their individual grievances, his critics have had to accept him as a first-rate administrator of a first-rate department.
LAPD, says the International City Managers Association, is “probably the most soundly organized large police department in the country.” It has, adds Chief H. J. Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, “the only adequate narcotics squad in the nation.” As a result, Los Angeles stands “well in the forefront in the battle against crime,” says Senator Estes Kefauver.
Parker is an essentially simple man who believes with all his soul that crime and Communism are the twin scourges of America and their suppression, by almost any means, the greatest challenge of our era. Some legal and social philosophers may question his simplifications, but he has built a record that demands from them a simple answer: either accept Parker and the LAPD he has fashioned or make a grave and weakening concession to the hostile elements.
Through inheritance and early environment, Parker absorbed the direct-action philosophy of the Old West. He was born in Lead, a town in the Black Hills of South Dakota, where an imaginative boy could still detect the six-shooters’ aroma in the air. His grandfather, William Henry Parker, had been one of the great frontier peace officers when there was no middle ground between right and wrong. After the gunslingers had been quieted, he had gone on to Washington as a Congressman; so the boy knew that, though the fight may be dangerous, courage and honesty win out in the end.
From old-timers he heard stories of outlaw and Sioux, showdown and massacre; and he knew the Valley of the Little Big Horn, Hay Stack Butte, Sundance Creek, Buffalo Gap, and the Belle Fourche. Though the frontiersmen were now old and garrulous, he caught their tough, impatient spirit; and it was to mark him for life.
In his early teens, he was subjected to more softening influences when he served as an altar boy at little St. Ambrose’s Catholic Church in Deadwood. But even religion had its pioneer austerities. Many a dark, bitter-cold Sunday morning during the Dakota winters he had to walk to church and light its furnace before donning his cassock and surplice.
Like his forefathers, he felt the call of the West, and when he was twenty, he migrated to California, settling in Los Angeles. Even then he was drawn to the law; and, after he got a job as a taxi driver, he bought legal tomes and studied them between fares. His interests focused on criminal law; from that he developed an interest in police work. On August 8,1927, Parker joined LAPD.
Today, police legal scholars are not a rarity, but in Parker’s rookie days the sight of a young policeman with his nose in Blackstone caused considerable squadroom comment. Parker ignored the hecklers, and three years later obtained his law degree and passed the state bar examination.
For a time, he considered leaving LAPD and making law his profession, but after the ‘29 crash, more shingles were being taken down than tacked up. “As I dimly recall,” Parker explains today, “there was a depression, and thus fate decided that I should remain with the Police Department.” He settled down to attack the departmental promotion exams with lawyer-like thoroughness, later married a policewoman, Helen Schultz, and gave his life without reservation to law enfor
cement.
On merit, on the unassailable results of the exams, he was a first-rate officer and he slowly advanced. But those were the days of blatant corruption within the department; and, as a policeman who was both intelligent and honest, Parker was one of the most feared men in the top-brass offices. He got so far and could go no farther.
For years he stood first on the civil service promotion lists for Inspector and Deputy Chief; yet he was always ignored. “I was the most passed-up officer in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department,” he says now. Resolutely he recalled the example of Grandfather Parker and held to his courage and honesty.
Finally, in the late 1930’s when Parker had completed a rough ten years with LAPD, the decay in the department exploded.
Those were the days when some policemen paid for their appointments, when the vice officers collected weekly “juice” from bawdy houses and gambling joints, when madams and bookies could get the honest men transferred out of harm’s way. But tough, wise Harry Raymond, an ace detective and former chief of the San Diego police, knew too much about their operations and other corruption pockets within the city administration.
That was dangerous for everybody. Raymond had worked on such celebrated cases as the Mary Pickford-Douglas Fairbanks kidnapping and the kidnap-murder-rape of twelve-year-old Marian Parker, daughter of a banker, by William Edward Hickman. Now the rogue cops in LAPD suspected he was after them, and they subjected him to counter-surveillance. LAPD’s “Special Intelligence Unit” under Captain Earle E. Kynette took over the job. The unit consisted of some eighteen to twenty policemen assigned largely to conducting extensive espionage on persons suspected of being politically opposed to the Shaw administration. Kynette’s so-called “eye squad” rented a house across the street from Raymond’s home, and a dictaphone was planted in his house.
Every waking hour he was under surveillance; and, being a pretty shrewd detective, he promptly realized it. But courageously he went on gathering evidence of malfeasance against the city government. Then one January morning, he rose, breakfasted, and went out to his garage. As he stepped on the starter, an explosion shattered the car and wrecked the garage. Raymond’s body was riddled by 150 fragments of shrapnel; but, after a long series of operations, he miraculously recovered.
The murder attempt backfired on the administration and led to the election of Mayor Fletcher Bowron on a reform ticket. Captain Kynette and his Lieutenant, Roy J. Allen, were sent to prison for both attempted murder and malicious use of explosives. Allen died in San Quentin, and Kynette was finally paroled in the early 1950’s. Despite his wounds, Harry Raymond lived to the ripe age of seventy-six.
Feeling the shame and frustration of a good cop, Parker vowed two things. If he ever were in the position of authority, he would revitalize LAPD by driving out the rogue cops and by rewarding the good ones with promotions right off the top of the civil service lists. That alone would stamp out most of the inefficiency, favoritism, and corruption. Further, to keep scandal from creeping in through the back door of the Department, he would button up vice as it had never been buttoned.
Then the war intervened, and Parker went overseas for the Army to organize police systems in Sardinia, Normandy, and Germany. When he returned, he found himself again in exile and again a helpless spectator as another vice scandal blew up in LAPD’s face. But this time LAPD’s shame and heartache were a minor price because real reform came to the department.
Mayor Bowron persuaded William A. Worton, a hard-bitten administrator, who was a retired Marine Corps general, to take over as Chief. With military vigor, Worton stamped out scandal from the halls of Central Division to the shores of the Pacific. He re-shuffled his men, rewarding the good and disciplining the bad, and brought back the almost forgotten element of morale.
This writer remembers attending a dinner meeting shortly after the General took over the Chief’s desk. The occasion: A minor milestone in my life—our then nebulous radio program “Dragnet” had garnered its first sponsor. In attendance were two NBC executives, the program’s writer, Jim Moser, and a great many policemen of all ranks and title.
When the General rose to address the gathering, we all settled back expectantly, awaiting great words of encouragement of our radio project.
He made a cursory remark that if the program continued its present course, it might someday be of value in accurately depicting law enforcement.
Then he turned to the policemen in the room:
“You’re cops. You’re damned good ones. When you walk down the street, I want to see those chests out a mile; those heads carried high, and be damned proud when someone says: ‘There goes a cop’.”
Good officers, including Parker, came out of the nooks and crannies where they had been tucked for safekeeping. Parker was assigned to the organization of an internal affairs unit to police policemen. Other top men established a planning office to chart the city’s trends and habits. Worton even introduced a military-style intelligence squad to scout the underworld and keep abreast of mobsters’ plans.
The renascent LAPD seriously alarmed rackets leaders, and the “Big Five” of vice and crime supported a recall movement against Mayor Bowron, according to intelligence reports that reached Headquarters. But Worton’s spit-and-polish police administration had made too favorable an impression on the electorate. The recall plans and the “Big Five’s” wistful hope for an “open city” administration collapsed.
And then, after a year of prodigious work, General Worton asked to be relieved of his interim appointment. A new Chief had to be chosen, and the underworld optimistically regrouped its forces in the expectation that it would soon be doing business again at the old stand. LAPD stood at the crossroads.
In any town there are three ways to become Chief of Police. You pay somebody, you know somebody, or you earn the job. In Los Angeles, at least in recent years, you earn it.
In March of 1950, two dozen LAPD officers of the rank of captain or higher began the civil service exam for Chief. When the results were in, the competition for the top police job in the West had resolved into a two-man race, odds even and take your choice.
One was the rugged, uncompromising Parker who at last had achieved the rating of Deputy Chief under Worton and headed the Patrol Bureau.
The other was the experienced, unrelenting Thad Brown, Chief of Detectives.
In every way, the race was a standoff. Parker was then forty-seven years old and had twenty-three years of service. Brown was forty-nine and had been with LAPD for twenty-four years. Both were nationally known police officers with their own devoted followings in and outside the department.
Parker had achieved a brilliant administrative record overseas for the Army, but Brown had served just as impressively on the home front in security and anti-sabotage work.
Parker made top score in the written examination and Brown beat him in the oral test. Overall, Parker had a 5.06 edge and was No. 1 on the eligibility list. But the final decision was still odds even and take your choice. Detective versus Patrolman.
In such a neck-and-neck race, it seemed, a dark horse could slip ahead to the wire. There was talk that Roger Murdock, No. 3 on the civil service list, might be chosen as a compromise appointee. Under the rules, the Police Commission had to make its choice from among the top three candidates. However, if a candidate withdrew, the men below would move up. For a time, No. 5, Bernard R. Caldwell, also looked like a comer in case any two men above him dropped out. But the list stood pat, and Caldwell eventually became head of the California State Highway Patrol.
In one of the stormiest, behind-the-scenes political battles ever known in Los Angeles, supporters of Parker and Brown argued and caucused for months. Late in July, four months after the exams, the Police Commission slowly resolved, by a three-to-two margin, in favor of Thad Brown.
Then fate stepped in.
Mrs. Curtis Albro, one of the commissioners who supported Brown, died on the eve of the vote, and the commission was d
eadlocked again.
Now the controversy boiled to a climax that had all the city watching. In the newspapers, it was a bigger story than baseball or the heat wave, and the 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.
Finally the Mayor, the commission, and ex-Chief Worton, who had brought Parker out of departmental limbo, sat down together. One pro-Brown commissioner swung over, then the holdout conceded, and the commission announced Parker’s victory by unanimous vote.
Thad Brown gracefully accepted the crusher, and Parker’s grin looked as though it could stretch from San, Diego to Seattle. He had served as aide to three Chiefs, and he had seen one underling after another jump him. Now, though it had taken a little while, Grandfather Parker’s old-fashioned reliance on the virtues of courage and honesty was justified.
Despite the protracted bitterness of the controversy, Parker’s appointment was accepted inside the department and out with surprising unanimity. Punning gracefully, the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial cartoon depicting the outstretched hand of Public Cooperation over the caption, “Park ‘er There, Chief.” The Times expressed the hope that the new Chief had “a carapace sufficiently durable to shed the slings and arrows of self-seeking politicians.”… “Perhaps the very heat of this controversy,” the Times added happily, “indicates the serious attitude adopted by the commission—that here was a decision which must withstand the years.”
Importantly, labor, which had often collided in the past with LAPD, and various minority groups also approved. Parker was the first Catholic ever to become Chief in Los Angeles, and a religious publication said the city’s 600,000 Catholics were particularly pleased by the appointment. “Chief Parker’s background indicates a wise choice,” commented The Southern California Teamster, official organ of AFL Joint Council No. 42. During the honeymoon, Parker could almost have been elected Mayor.