by Jack Webb
Even a first-rate Chief like Parker couldn’t survive without the support of the Commission. Especially a Chief like Parker, as a matter of fact. The Commission is the shock absorber between him and the public, protecting the one and reassuring the other that in spite of LAPD’s “professionalization,” mufti still controls the uniform.
In choosing Parker in the first place, the commissioners knew that they were getting a peppery, tenacious, dedicated man, and that thereafter their weekly Wednesday meetings would never be routine. Nor have they been; but the Commission, without degenerating into a rubber stamp, has not wavered in its support.
When Parker vowed, “With all the fiber of my being, I will see to it that crooked rats who would change the City of Angels to the City of Diablos will not do so,” the Commission backed him—and no fingers were crossed under the table. A politically-minded commission could have given lip service and then cut him down with backstage sabotage.
In the first two months of his administration, there was the opportunity to get rid of him if the commissioners already regretted their choice.
In a routine traffic shakedown, a police reserve officer shot and killed an unarmed, eighteen-year-old college honor student. Parker was caught between public indignation and the strong, 710-man reserve corps which serves without pay. Parker promptly ordered that thereafter no reserves could patrol except in the company of a regular officer. Dozens of old-time reservists turned in their badges, lambasting Parker as a political grandstander. The Chief stood firm and the Commission backed him up. And it has done the same time and again in petty matters and Los Angeles causes celebres.
This support is especially significant because the Commission is bipartisan and biracial and includes followers of the three great religions. Thus, when the representative of some minority group seeks a favor or lodges a protest, he knows that across the table are men who sympathize with the motives, tensions, and hopes of minorities. He cannot complain that the deck is stacked against him.
Its own diversity has given the Commission the courage and assurance to act firmly in delicate matters. Very few political appointees anywhere in the country would think of turning down routine requests from any religious group, for example. Yet LAPD’s commissioners rejected a permit for a religious parade on the common sense grounds that the guard duty would take up too many LAPD man-hours and “interfere with its ability to cope with crime.” “Fringe” prayer groups have been denied the right to broadcast services from sound trucks because it would constitute an infringement of the public welfare. And the Commission has risked the wrath of California’s many left wingers by forcing Communists and Communist front groups to register with LAPD.
Big names do not particularly impress the five quasi-cops. When the city outlawed discharge of firearms within its limits, Clark Gable asked an exception for his Encino estate in San Fernando Valley. Gable requested the right to shoot coyotes, blue jays, and ground squirrels which would have given him a sort of miniature shooting lodge. Chief Parker protested that any exception would retard LAPD’s program against use of firearms within the city. Parker was upheld, Gable refused.
“The Commission is the servant of the electorate in police matters and is the means by which the voice of each citizen may be heard,” LAPD’s annual report states, and the commissioners take their own department’s words to heart. In behalf of the people, they even collided head on with the Los Angeles City Fire Department.
The situation arose when Fire Chief John Alderson disclosed to the Fire Commission that the racial-integration program had been eliminated by moving all transferred Negro firemen back into all-Negro stations. Before that, he asserted, there had been danger of riots and bloodshed because of “carloads of Negroes who follow fire trucks to fires and try to create dissension and trouble.”
Promptly the Police Commission rapped the Fire Chief’s knuckles for failing to notify it of any situation which “might have led to riot and bloodshed.” Alderson, the Commission said bluntly, had been remiss in his duty “as both a public official and a citizen.”
The Commission has backed up Parker in his unending harassment of gamblers and contributed one or two harassments of its own. With its support, the Chief obtained a ruling from the City Attorney that bookies who serve felony sentences in the county jail can be classified as ex-convicts like the offenders who go to state prison.
Thus, by city ordinance, the gamblers had to register with the police as ex-criminals. Two weeks after their registration got under way, more than a thousand had complied with the order, and the police department ran out of registration blanks.
The Commission went Parker one better in a manner which only civilians could accomplish. Through Commissioner Michael Kohn, the anti-gaming law was strengthened to include as a violation even a visit to a gambling establishment which operates behind barricaded doors. Whereas police often deal lightly with the citizen who patronizes the gambler, Kohn’s aim was the bettor who makes the games possible.
“The barricaded nature of these joints makes their purpose obvious,” he explained, “and it would be a fair assumption that visitors to such places are there to gamble.”
And, when valid complaints are lodged against LAPD, the Commission follows through as the representative of the public. Thus, motorists who complained that motorcycle policemen were taking fifteen to twenty minutes to write out traffic tickets received a sympathetic reception from the Commission. It was bad enough to get a ticket, the Commission agreed, without also being unnecessarily delayed.
As a matter of public relations, LAPD’s five bosses ordered that the officers speed up the procedure to five minutes flat. “The only contact most residents have with the Police Department is through traffic tickets,” the Commission observed.
Often there was deeper concern about issues of public relations, too. A few years back, the word “race” was eliminated from the traffic ticket issued by the policeman to the public. Minority races resented receiving a ticket which indicated the color of a man’s skin. They felt, also, that many times this was the reason for getting the ticket in the first place. So LAPD erased the word and closed the gap a little more.
Similarly, the Commission signed the death warrant of the annual LAPD police show so that businessmen would not feel obligated to buy tickets and program advertising. Further, there was a growing Commission objection to lowering the dignity of the police officer by making him sell the Police Show ads and tickets.
Though Parker runs his department as “the pro” who knows where and when he wants to deploy his men, the commission doesn’t hesitate to give him advice when it hears from the public.
For example, burglary, which occurs some 27,000 times yearly, hitting one home in every hundred, is LAPD’s worst headache because it strikes the average householder. As a taxpayer, he is quick to protest.
During one serious outbreak of burglaries in the San Fernando Valley, the Commission received so many protests that it asked Parker for an emergency patrol in the area and the assignment of extra men where needed. Parker obeyed and the outbreak subsided.
By and large, it’s difficult to understand why a civilian accepts the largely thankless task of worrying about LAPD’s problems. Certainly it isn’t the handsome salary of $10 a week. Nor is it the prestige.
“Sometimes you figure maybe it is a thankless job, being a police commissioner,” admits Herbert A. Greenwood, the Negro member of the board. “That is, people think it’s a picayunish appointment.”
“The average person doesn’t know that the Commission is the head of their Police Department,” adds Commissioner Kohn.
Nor is it “politics.”
Chief Parker is remarkably unskillful at “playing politics,” and far from dictating to him, the commission is usually in the position of explaining or defending Parker to the public. The only answer seems to lie in that often-suspect phrase “public service.” The commissioners are genuinely concerned as citizens with law enforcement in the
ir city.
Consider them, one by one:
Michael Kohn, who has served as President and Vice President of the Commission, is a native son of a Jewish produce merchant who migrated from Hungary. He is forty-eight. Thirty years ago Mike Kohn was an office boy in the powerful Los Angeles legal firm of Loeb and Loeb. Today he is a senior partner. He knows Los Angeles, and Los Angeles knows Mike Kohn.
One of the big passions in his life has been Los Angeles and its youth. The father of two sons, he has worked hard for such groups as Hillel and the Big Brothers in LA. In addition, he has ranged into every facet of communal life which emphasizes youth programs.
Most of all, he believes the public must understand that the Commission is part of the public, too, and that together their job is to encourage a constantly stronger LAPD. In one optimistic message to the Mayor, written in behalf of the Commission, Commissioner Kohn sees that awareness growing steadily. There has been, he says, “a remarkable upsurge of active public cooperation in all phases of law enforcement,” and he points out joyfully:
“The Los Angeles citizen has not only accepted the progressive efforts of the Los Angeles Police Department, but is coming to insist upon this type of police work as a public right. Without question, such a right exists and a continuing public demand for it is the best guarantee that professional law enforcement will prosper and grow in our city.”
John Ferraro, the son of an Italian farmer-macaroni manufacturer, was twenty-eight years old at the time of his appointment and thirty-two when he served a term as Commission president. His age seems unnecessarily young for such an important body, but there is a good reason.
Unlike the old days, Los Angeles now is a city of youth. About a quarter of the population still is in grade or high school, and seven in ten Angelenos have not reached their fortieth birthday. Hence, when Norris Poulson became Mayor, he felt that youth deserved representation on the Police Commission and Ferraro looked like the right man. A former ail-American tackle at the University of Southern California, and a wartime Navy ensign, he had become a successful executive with his own insurance business.
Poulson proved right. “A lot of my contemporaries took interest in what we in the Police Department were trying to do,” Commissioner Ferraro says. “They began to wonder about the operation of LAPD. They asked a lot of questions. It was a healthy, creative interest; and it has proved good for the city and for the Police Department.”
Though in civilian life he is executive vice president of one of the fifteen largest advertising agencies in the world, Commissioner Emmett C. McGaughey is the only board member with professional police experience. For eight years, he was an FBI agent. Since he did most of his federal sleuthing in Los Angeles, his law enforcement contacts are valuable to the commission.
On one occasion, from a source which he won’t divulge, he received a tip that a LAPD officer had been guilty of malfeasance. High brass in the department refused to believe the report, but McGaughey persuaded them to put the man under surveillance. He was shortly dismissed from the department.
As a former FBI man, McGaughey, like Parker, firmly believes that in the preservation of the American way of life, it is law enforcement which carries “the greatest challenge and the greatest burden.” And, as a father in his mid-forties with three small boys in public school and a girl ready to enter, he feels a personal responsibility to face up to the task.
“I want to help make this city as good as I can for them to five and grow up in,” he says.
When you are a police commissioner, the job may call you back from Seattle or Salt Lake City, or wherever you happen to be at the time on private business. It’s happened any number of times to Bill Lucitt. Or the job may mean working nights in your own garage to repair toys for underprivileged kids. Or counseling potential delinquents. Or helping policemen themselves who are in difficulty. That’s the kind of commission work that appeals to Bill’s Irish generosity.
A simple, friendly man, he still lives in the seven-room Hollywood bungalow where he and his wife, Mary, began raising their own four children thirty-five years ago. Though he has never been a sworn policeman, Commissioner Lucitt knows more about thieves than anyone else on the board. For twenty-eight years he has directed internal security for one of the nation’s largest retail and mail-order chains throughout the Pacific Coast, Hawaii, and Canada. That means he isn’t home very much of the time, but Bill always flies back for the Wednesday meetings.
Only once, the other commissioners recall, has Bill ever been abrupt in any commission matter. That was when he summarily opposed the granting of a junk dealer’s license to an applicant. It developed that three years before, the man had been a porter in one of the stores Bill polices—and Bill had caught him stealing $500 worth of credit coupons.
On several occasions, Lucitt has been loaned to the Federal Government as an investigator in connection with Congressional Investigations. During his career, he has worked closely with the enforcement agencies on the federal, state, and local levels.
He has worked in cooperation with the U.S. Marshal’s Office, the Secret Service Agencies, the Department of Justice, and the Postal Inspection Service.
Through his work he is widely known by law enforcement agencies throughout the seven western states, particularly the police and sheriffs departments of cities and counties of the Pacific Coast.
With all of these contacts, as well as traveling throughout the United States on special assignments and through seventeen foreign countries on pleasure and observation, Bill Lucitt feels qualified to make the proud assertion: “The Los Angeles Police Department is the finest and most efficient Police Department in the World.”
Lucitt subscribes to Chief Parker’s philosophy that the major requisite in curbing juvenile delinquency and preventing crime is a re-education in self-discipline and a return to the recognition of moral absolutes.
Herb Greenwood was born into a big family, six girls and four boys, counting him, in Atlanta, Georgia. His father, a letter carrier, never made too much money to support a family of that size; and, when Herb was only twelve, his father died.
Nevertheless, working “every job in the book,” Herb Greenwood put himself through school. Back in 1923, when he was still only twenty-four years old, he won his law degree from Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, and the next year passed the exam for the Illinois bar.
Like many a young lawyer, he got his start by defending the needy and poverty-stricken who seemed to file in a shabby, unending, often uncomprehending line through the halls of justice. He developed a warm understanding for the underdog that has never left him.
A quarter of a century ago he moved from Chicago to California; but, in the depths of the depression, there was little legal work for a Negro newcomer from “the East.” Herb Greenwood went to work for the state, serving first as social worker and then as a liquor control officer for the State Board of Equalization. But he kept up his legal studies and later was appointed an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles. When he received his LAPD commissionership, he gave up the federal post and returned to private practice. He was then in his fifties, and it was a serious decision.
“Yes, some people take it as a picayunish appointment,” he says. “But I didn’t. I felt it was an opportunity for service—if I tried. If I did try, and did give service, then it was not at all picayunish.”
As the representative of Los Angeles’ 300,000 Negroes, Herb Greenwood has been in a particularly trying spot at times because of the impasse between Chief Parker and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. More than once, Herb admits ruefully, he has felt “like a sitting duck,” but this was his special opportunity for service and he refused to close his eyes to it. He has worked hard to convince the NAACP officials in Los Angeles that Parker is a sincere and unprejudiced official. When the commotion arose over integration in the Los Angeles Fire Department, Commissioner Greenwood could say proudly that it had been lon
g since achieved and taken for granted in LAPD.
But then there is the other side. A Negro railroad porter who reported late for work in Chicago blamed the delay on his brutal and unjustified detention at the hands of Los Angeles policemen. Not only NAACP but also the porter’s company joined in the investigation. Once again, Herb Greenwood was in the middle.
But, the investigation showed, the porter had been involved in a barroom disturbance and arrested only after the bartender had called the police. He later received fair, routine handling and while his court appearance delayed his return to Chicago, he could hardly blame LAPD for that.
“Being a police commissioner has been an education,” Commissioner Greenwood says. “You hear criticism of the police; and you, as a member of the department, are criticized yourself.
“When I was in Chicago years ago, defending in criminal cases, I used to wonder about policemen. That was in the Twenties. I learned. There’s nothing wrong with policemen that public interest and public cooperation won’t cure.”
But he believes that, like himself, the public has to be educated. “You have a certain, small element which claims continually that enforcement isn’t strict enough. They forever want more enforcement. But they don’t understand that more enforcement means more policemen. And they just don’t understand how much enforcement they are getting—they’re lucky to be getting—with the number of men we have.”
Despite dwindling LAPD manpower, Greenwood says, the constantly increasing number of yearly arrests shows what LAPD is accomplishing. For seven straight years, he points out, the productivity of the individual officer has gone up, and as proudly as Chief Parker, he adds: “Nobody can tell me that LAPD isn’t doing a good job! I just show them the figures.”