The Badge

by Jack Webb

  In view of these cases, not to mention the thousands of times when shakedowns do disclose the weapons, Chief Parker feels his men have a good probable cause to make searches in the field. Yet if they find any criminal evidence, they face a dilemma: Will the courts say they have again overstepped their authority?

  To Parker, one solution would be adoption of the Michigan plan which exempts cases involving narcotics or deadly weapons from the corset of “exclusionary evidence.” Urging this proposal before a State Senate subcommittee, he told them of the breakdown in enforcement after the Cahan decision and said:

  “I think it is important that you have a statement from the ‘workers in the vineyard.’ It is easy for the courts and prosecutors to criticize because the police, not the courts and prosecutors, are liable to civil suits for errors in judgment.

  “The breakdown came when the police were unable to bring criminals before the bar of justice. You can’t blame the police. You must blame the high court of this state and the prosecutors who favor the Cahan decision and the legislators who have failed to do something about it.”

  II

  “At the present time, race, color, and creed are useful statistical and tactical devices. So are age groupings, sex, and employment…. If persons of Mexican, Negro, or Anglo-Saxon ancestry, for some reason, contribute heavily to other forms of crime, police deployment must take that into account.”

  —Chief Parker

  Probably no other city in the country, even New York, presents the racial admixtures of Los Angeles. The largest Japanese group in the nation, the third largest Chinese population, the largest Mexican-descent colony outside of Mexico City itself, all live in Los Angeles. There are 300,000 Negroes, more than the number of white and Colored combined in most Southern towns.

  All told, one hundred different races are represented in the West Coast’s melting pot, and the non-Caucasians probably comprise more than forty per cent of the people. To Parker it seems as plain as his badge that LAPD’s Modus Operandi cards and other records should note the race and color of the criminal as well as his nickname, hangouts, associates, and other identificatory detail. If LAPD is pursuing a Chinese rapist, it’s because he has violated a woman, not because he is Chinese, Parker feels; and a radio broadcast of his race and color does help to narrow down the search.

  The minorities, particularly the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, do not see it that way. NAACP has charged Parker with racism, persecution, and discrimination. An unsigned communication on its letterhead to the police commission demanded his removal. After a truce meeting between Parker and NAACP leaders in Los Angeles, which had been arranged by neutral sources, the Negro leaders discarded their suspicion that he is an intolerant man, but they still fear his seemingly blind absorption in law enforcement. And Parker still says doggedly:

  “From an ethnological point of view, Negro, Mexican, and Anglo-Saxon are unscientific breakdowns; they are a fiction. From a police point of view, they are a useful fiction and should be used as long as they remain useful.”

  Unfortunately perhaps for the cause of sweetness and light between police and minorities, Parker’s candor goes further. He cannot resist saying (a heresy in some circles!) that the minorities can be wrong, too. Thus, at the Institute on Police-Community Relations at Michigan State University, sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, he insisted:

  “The fact that minorities have received intolerant and discriminatory treatment does not automatically lend justice to all of their demands. They are as prone to error as majority groups, and the wiser and calmer citizens within those groups recognize this fact. Thoughtful citizens expect the police to stand their ground when they believe they are right. They expect the police to criticize as well as be criticized.”

  Against this impolitic statement, against the sporadic charges that an arrest was made or a crime complaint ignored because of the color of the skin involved, Parker points to the records. During his regime, there has been no major racial strife in the city. Much as the many community agencies have helped toward this end, he feels that it is the professionalization of the police that has been the key factor.

  During his thirteen weeks of training, the Los Angeles police cadet must absorb about a year’s learning. That means cramming a prodigious amount of basic technical information on everything from weapons to law. But Parker also insists that the cadet learn the emotions and drives of racial groups, their movements, and the tensions that arise from such movements. There are courses in Police Sociological Problems, Ethics, Human Relations, Professionalism, Civil Disturbances, and Public Relations. Even in the purely technical courses like Interrogation, Patrol Tactics, and Investigation, human relations also are emphasized.

  During his thirteen weeks, the cadet is closely observed for any symptoms of prejudice which might make him a poor police risk. Unknown to him, conditions of tensions are deliberately created to test his reactions. And finally he is briefed on the racial composition of the various police districts in Chief Parker’s own words:

  “It must be made clear that there are no ‘Jim Crow’ areas, no ‘Ghettos.’ Every police division has everything found in all divisions, differing only in proportion.

  “The aim here is to correct stereotyped impressions that the city is divided into clearly defined groups and areas and that law enforcement differs accordingly. The Police Department’s policy of one class of citizenship, one standard of police technique, then becomes readily understandable.”

  Those who profess concern about Parker’s attitude on individual rights acknowledge one strong point in his favor. Whenever those rights are threatened by an outsider, he moves promptly with all the facilities of LAPD. The outsider may practice blackmail and extortion (“the big underquoted crimes of our day,” Parker says), or he may operate in the gamey world of the private eye and the scandal magazine. The latter is in the twilight zone of legality, and Parker has had to think up new procedures to carry his attack.

  Thus, when the California State Senate decided to investigate private detectives, Parker quietly assigned his best Intelligence and Bunco men to the inquiry. For months one Lieutenant did nothing except run down the tie-ins between scandal mags, private eyes, and strong-arm collection agencies. He turned up the scabrous story of Confidential Magazine’s dirt-collection system in which gossip fed by prostitutes was double-checked by private investigators.

  One admitted having hidden in the bushes and secretly shot fifty feet of colored film of an actress at her Bel Air home. “I would have taken indiscreet or embarrassing pictures,” the peeping eye confessed, “but I just had no chance to.” He surrendered his film to the committee.

  Another divulged Confidential’s technique for printing all the dirt possible and still escaping reprisal by libel:

  “Say that movie star ‘X’ has committed adultery with some girl. I am given a memo as to what phases of the story they want checked. Say that movie star ‘X’ drove a white foreign-made car and was working on a movie and his wife, also a movie star, is on location in Arizona.

  “Say he went to this girl’s apartment and they saw the landlady on the way in. I will be told to check whether he has a white sports car and whether he is working in a certain movie, whether his wife is in Arizona and if the landlady saw the couple in question. That’s how it works.”

  The undercover work which had been done primarily by Parker’s men led in turn to a grand jury investigation and even further disclosures about the love-and-tell-for-pay activities of call girls and bit actors. One notorious Hollywood party girl admitted to the jury that she fed stories to Confidential by allowing a private eye to tap her phone while she was talking to an actor. She even sold the magazine intimate details of her marriage, involving her husband and a movie actress. The grand jury returned indictments which led to the successful prosecution of the slick-paper scandal rag and a considerable toning down of its editorial content.

  Parker
would love, almost above all, to stamp out blackmail and the twin crime of extortion (which carries with it violence or threat of violence). These ancient, un-American crimes flourish increasingly in Hollywood, detectives believe, but the victims will almost never testify, even when police know what is going on. Therefore, from Parker down, they were delighted to receive a brave complaint from Victor Berke, a thirty-nine-year-old tax consultant.

  In the process of moving from Chicago to Los Angeles, Berke stopped off briefly in Las Vegas to try his hand at the gaming tables. He dropped $11,000. Berke paid off $10,000 and wrote a check for $1,000 which later bounced. Soon after, he was summoned by telephone to a Hollywood hotel and given an ultimatum.

  He was now to pay $3,300—or else. The “or else” was violence.

  When Berke told his story to the LAPD Bunco Squad, it was the first documented expose in Los Angeles of extortion growing out of Las Vegas gambling losses. Parker had the case sped to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury. One night while Berke was dining with a client in a Hollywood cafe, three men paused briefly at his table.

  “You’re dead!” one of them muttered.

  Then came further threats to keep him from testifying against the strongarmers. LAPD retaliated by giving Berke round-the-clock security protection. Three suspects involved in the case threw in the towel and pleaded guilty to attempted extortion.

  Certainly in all such threats to private rights Parker is vigilant enough to satisfy even the American Civil Liberties Union.

  According to Section 199 of the Los Angeles City Charter, “The General Manager of the Police Department shall be known as the Chief of Police.” So, in addition to crusading for what he considers right and denouncing crime on the grand scale, Chief Parker must administer what is essentially a service organization. Ten thousand times daily the bulbs light on the communication system, and each is a service call. The taxpayer may demand relief from a barking dog, report a murder, or ask for a radio car to fill in a week-old minor accident report (because an insurance company requires police action on the form).

  Obviously Parker has to take the big view and work from the top down in an organization which is handling seven calls a minute. He holds a tight personal rein on what he considers the key activities of big-city police work, but trusts his subordinates to carry through on detail.

  On the key jobs, internal discipline, intelligence, public relations, vice control, and planning, the field forces are given responsibility to carry through. But administrative divisions with both staff authority and line responsibility double-check their work—and so does Parker. On vice, for example, he is taking no chances on fresh scandals that could upset him as other police administrations have been upset in the past.

  The Administrative Vice Squad maintains a constant survey to determine that vice officers in the field do their job and, if necessary, do it for them. In turn, through reports on volume and direction of vice activities throughout the city, Ad Vice is directly responsible to Parker.

  He is the only Chief in modern Los Angeles history who has survived a change in city administration and he is determined to keep it that way.

  For the average police officer, he has fought to keep the politicians out of the department. He has made good his early promise to himself that promotions would be on merit, “off the top” of the civil eligibility lists. He has cut dead wood, raised recruiting standards, and pleaded at City Hall for higher salaries. He wangled half the raise he wanted from the City Council, but he keeps coming back. “Professionalization” of the police, his dream of dreams, requires men of superior backgrounds, and they can be attracted only by decent salaries and working conditions.

  For a restless man of action, he puts almost touching faith in the value of paper work. For example, he made permanent the Intelligence Division which had been set up by General Worton to infiltrate, reconnoiter, and provide advance information on the plans of the criminal syndicates. Properly, this is police activity on the federal level, but Parker gave Intelligence carte blanche because no federal agency was supplying the information to local law enforcement bodies.

  From one end of the country to the other, Intelligence amassed detailed dossiers on every important mobster in the U.S., many of whom never had seen Los Angeles and probably never would. Parker felt that in an airplane age when cities are only minutes apart, the long job of interviewing and corresponding with police and crime commissions from Maine to Florida was worth the time and expense. And from this file has grown a federation of fifty-two law-enforcement agencies west of the Mississippi dedicated to the exchange of vital statistics on the existence and movement of the nation’s criminal network.

  Similarly, Chief Parker has thoroughly supported the Planning and Research Division which he calls “possibly the most interesting development within the police department in some years.” What a riot control expert can do with tear gas P&R does with slide rules and graphs to predict where and what time how many policemen will be needed.

  To achieve this, the scholars of crime digested population figures, family size, income, education, ages, census surveys, uniform crime reports, local social and economic studies, standard reference works like the Municipal Year Book, and any other Los Angeles statistic they could lay hands on. Their findings have brought about new and exact re-deployments of LAPD’s undermanned field forces.

  In Planning’s statistical unit, more than two million police reports have been studied and more than four million IBM cards coded. If you wonder why, here is an example.

  When detectives in San Fernando Valley seized a theft-and-burglary gang, its members began confessing crimes by the dozens which stretched from Los Angeles through cities along the Southern California coast as far south as San Diego. The crimes were not committed at definite times, and three separate M.O.‘s were used.

  Sometimes the gang (so they said) carried safes away from service stations; other times they burglarized the places without removing the safes; and still again they stole money from vending machines in the stations. Skeptical detectives turned to the Stats unit to pinpoint and verify their story, if possible, from the thousands of burglary-theft complaints on file. The Stats office machines quickly picked out 200 cards, of which 198 were traced to the gang.

  In P&R’s legal section some 1,500 questions asked by department members are researched and answered yearly. Recently the section saved the city a sizable $40,000. That amount had been claimed for the maintenance of city prisoners committed to county jail, but LAPD’s detailed legal report in opposition was sustained by the City Attorney.

  Even the Department Manual, a prosaic-looking book in a three-ring loose-leaf binder, represents a formidable task of research. To compile it, P&R made abstracts from some 4,600 departmental orders, teletypes and bulletins, as well as bureau manuals and numerous police commission resolutions dating back for a quarter of a century.

  Whether it is the recognition of the imminence of childbirth or the proper report to be used when a consul is arrested, Department Manual is the “how-to” of LAPD procedure. Down to disposition of dead animals found on the street (notify Dead Animal Dispatcher, Refuse Collection Division, Department of Public Works), no problem is too humble to be excluded.

  In this division of paper work, there is even a section which studies paper work to combine, simplify, or eliminate police forms. During one year the section studied 282 different forms, eliminated 109, revised 113, and added 60 new forms.

  More than the public realizes, investigation and apprehension of criminals depend on the recorded knowledge of their habits and methods; but, at the same time, a department can become “paper-bound.” When Parker became Chief, he introduced the latest business and government techniques in paper handling. As a result, he reduced the number of forms by over one hundred in his first year in office and with simplified design saved up to thirty-five per cent in time needed for dictating, typing, and filing them. The changes enabled him to use civilian help and free one hundred an
d eight policemen for field duty.

  In looking to the future, Parker hopes that there will be deeper public awareness of the dangers presented by organized crime. In fact, he says, the two major political parties should formulate policies for dealing with the problem nationally. At the same time, he feels that crime is also an intimate, local affair demanding your personal support of your own crime fighters.

  “It is physically impossible for the Los Angeles Police Department to eliminate lawlessness, vice, and corruption from this city if the citizens do not honestly want such things eliminated,” he emphasizes. And he has pleaded with his fellow Angelenos, “Give the nation the leadership for which it is looking by starting the old-fashioned habit of being honest in government!”

  Essentially Parker is a moralist. While full adherence to Scriptural ethics would abolish crime overnight, he fears we have become “a confused nation” and too many of us have adopted double standards “adjustable to private and business life.” Of necessity, the policeman represents the “thin blue line” which protects the truly law-abiding. Not, he adds quickly, that LAPD lays claim to perfection.

  “Mistakes will be made, perhaps serious mistakes,” he says. “We do not claim perfection within our ranks. But they will be made in good faith.

  “We have attempted, within the limits of our authority, to enlist the finest personnel available. However, since the City Charter limits us to selecting mortal human beings, we may continue to experience some mortal weaknesses.”

  THE COMMISSION

  BEHIND CHIEF WILLIAM H. PARKER ARE five men who also wear badges. They also have taken the policeman’s oath to support the Constitutions of the United States and California and faithfully to discharge their duties “in and for the city of Los Angeles to the best of their ability.” Yet they are civilians serving, by mayoralty appointment and City Council approval, on the Police Commission. They are cops by courtesy, but mighty important cops.