L.A. Noir (36 page)

Parker’s enemies warned the new mayor that he was making a mistake. Two weeks after Poulson was sworn in, former Police Commission member Hugh Irey published a two-part open letter to the new mayor in the
Los Angeles Mirror
. Its purpose, in the author’s words, was to present “irrefutable facts to show that it is physically impossible for the Police Commission—under the present system—to be more than a figurehead for the Chief of Police.” Irey described Parker as “probably the most powerful official in the city.” He insisted that his goal was not to attack Parker, whom he described as a man of integrity, but rather to offer a critique of a flawed system. But Irey did paint a disturbing portrait of the police department under the new chief. He called attention to the chief’s $85,000 “secret service fund.” He described how the commission was powerless to conduct its own investigation into brutality cases, lacking even the authority to review the material used by the chief to formulate the report he presented to the board on any given incident. In conclusion, Irey called for full-time, paid commissioners, with investigators drawn from the detectives’
bureau (which unlike the three other plainclothes units—Internal Affairs, intelligence, and administrative vice—did not work directly under Parker’s personal supervision).

“Until these recommendations … are put into effect the Los Angeles Police Commission will continue to be a mere figurehead and rubber stamp for the Chief of Police—one of the most powerful and autocratic officials in the city,” warned Irey.

Parker just scoffed.

“I’ve told the Police Commissioners repeatedly that anytime three of them are against me to let me know and I’ll retire,” he replied.

This was disingenuous. No Police Commission would ever act against the mayor on such an important issue, and Mayor Poulson had made it clear that he could not do without Parker. Irey’s warnings were ignored. No changes were made to the organization of the commission. The department would continue to be run as Parker’s personal fiefdom. Local observers marveled at Parker’s triumph.

“Hardly anyone likes Parker, a contentious, abrasive individual who will never give Dale Carnegie lessons on ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People,’” wrote the
Los Angeles Daily News
. Yet Parker had achieved something that his predecessors had not. He had become irreplaceable.

      POULSON HOPED that his Police Commission would be able to restrain Chief Parker. But the limitations of the commission’s structure and the dependencies on the department it fostered soon reasserted themselves. The commission met just one afternoon a week, typically for no more than an hour and a half. Most of its meetings were devoted to humdrum licensing tasks, okaying requests for parades, licensing pawnshops, vetting requests by churches to hold rummage sales, approving applications for dance halls. Its only staff were police department personnel. On those occasions when it did take up larger, policing issues, it relied on the police for guidance. Not surprisingly, the course of action it elected to pursue was almost always the one the department itself would have chosen.

If those weren’t constraints enough, Chief Parker set out to actively win over the Police Commission’s most important member, former Poulson campaign manager Jack Irwin. By the end of his first year in office, Irwin was routinely siding with Chief Parker over his old friend the mayor. Poulson would later blame Parker for wrecking his friendship with Irwin. Slowly, Chief Parker was gaining the upper hand.

    POULSON STRUGGLED in his dealings with the chief. Parker prided himself on his analytic approach to problems, but Poulson found him to be a volatile and unpredictable partner. At times, Parker seemed to accept that the city’s elected officials had an important role in governing the department, as in setting salaries. At other times, even the most basic attempts by Mayor Poulson to guide the department would set Parker off. In the spring of 1954, for instance, Mayor Poulson (an accountant by training) and City Administrative Officer Samuel Leask decided to take a close look at Parker’s budget request for the coming year. In doing so, Leask discovered that 750 officers were working at clerical and office tasks that seemed to require no special policing skills. Another 56 officers were guarding 200 low-risk chronic drunks at the Bouquet Valley police farm, a facility commonly known as the dude ranch. Transferring those officers to the field would dramatically increase the number of cops on the street without altering the standards Parker insisted had provided the city with the world’s greatest police force. Surely, some of the other officers could be diverted to more arduous work as well, Poulson and Leask reasoned.

But when Leask presented the idea to Parker, the chief reacted angrily. It wasn’t so much the substance of the idea that annoyed Parker. Over the course of the preceding two years, Parker himself had released 109 officers for fieldwork by hiring civilian substitutes. Rather, Parker objected to the idea that Sam Leask—a man who knew nothing about policing—could swoop in and find inefficiencies that Parker had missed. At a public meeting on the police department’s budget chaired by the mayor, Parker made no attempt to conceal his pique. The chief repeatedly interrupted Leask’s attempts to present his analysis, going so far as to inform the astonished mayor that the management and budget of the police department were “his [meaning Parker’s] own business.” Parker’s behavior was so boorish that Mayor Poulson, who was chairing the meeting, finally stepped in and asked Parker to let Leask speak.

Parker exploded, shouting, as he jabbed his finger at the city’s chief elected official, that he would not be “intimidated” by the mayor. He even threatened to resign.

Mayor Poulson was astonished.

“You talk like you’re offended and that we have no right to ask you how your department functions and how the taxpayers’ money is spent,” Poulson told Parker. “You immediately get angry. You talk like we were sticking our nose into something that wasn’t our business. It is our business and there’s no use you getting red in the face.”

It was classic Parker. The chief prided himself on being rational and
fact-driven; he often described critics as “emotional” or “hysterical.” But in fact, Parker himself was a highly emotional man whose responses to “attacks” (real or perceived) were often more than a little hysterical. Eventually, Parker calmed down. However, he continued to resist the mayor’s dictates. In the years that followed, Parker allowed the percentage of civilian employees in the department to rise only incrementally, from 23.3 percent to 25 percent.

This policy of resistance came at a high cost. Tight budgets, high standards, and attrition continued to take a terrible toll on the department. In a memo to the Police Commission in the spring of 1954, Parker noted that in July 1955 the department would have 4,453 sworn personnel—roughly the same number of officers the department had when he had become chief of police in August 1950. Yet during this same period, Los Angeles had added more than 120,000 new residents. The city was growing; its police department was not.

So far, the consequences of this situation had been minimal. Despite the comparatively small size of the LAPD, Los Angeles’s crime rate remained slightly lower than in other big cities. However, crime was growing fast—faster even than the city’s population. Yet while Parker desperately wanted more officers, he rejected the idea that the police had any connection to the crime rate.

“You can blame the situation on your police if you wish,” he told the city council during an appearance in late 1953. “You can lay it in their laps, if you want to. Blame them even for social problems over which they have little control…. But let’s be practical and realistic. The police do not create crime problems…. Nothing is solved by hysteria.”

“I wish that crime were a simple plague to be solved by isolating a troublesome microbe, but it is not,” Parker declared in a 1953 speech on crime and belief. “I wish it could be eliminated materialistically, by continually supplying Americans with chrome fixtures, softer beds, and shorter work hours, but I know that it cannot be thus eradicated. Certainly I do wish that the police had it within their power to solve the problem alone, but I know that they cannot.” Only by restoring the citizenry’s belief in the sanctity of the law could chaos be avoided, he concluded.

Parker’s speeches called his audiences to a sterner morality. But the chief’s worldview was fatalistic, and his analysis of society’s problems discouraged practical responses. It was one thing to argue that the police weren’t responsible for the increase in crime. But Parker seemed to be suggesting that neither police efforts nor any “materialistic” initiatives could address the rise in crime. Politically, this was a convenient proposition for everyone. It allowed Parker to avoid questions about why what was
supposedly the nation’s best police force was presiding over such dramatic increases in crime, and it allowed politicians to avoid raising taxes to expand a department run by a man many of them distrusted. It was easier to flatter the chief for creating the country’s greatest police force, one that could do more with less.

But of course, Parker still faced the challenge of policing a growing city with a stagnant police force. The key to doing more with less was intelligence. Intelligence kept the underworld from buying politicians, corrupting police officers, and controlling the police department. Intelligence was the key to taking the fight to the underworld, and in the mid-1950s, the underworld seemed to be the locus of serious crime in Los Angeles. But the department’s ability to collect intelligence was about to suffer a series of blows from an unexpected and formidable adversary—the courts.

      FOR DECADES, police departments had enjoyed wide latitude in how they went about apprehending criminal suspects. In 1914, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that evidence improperly or illegally obtained could not be used at trial—a principle known today as the exclusionary rule. But the exclusionary rule applied only to federal law enforcement agencies. For local law enforcement, the proof was in the pudding. If the evidence was incriminating, courts typically asked few questions about how it was obtained. Only the most flagrant examples of police misconduct could bestir most judges to exclude evidence. The result was corner-cutting. Civil liberties advocate Hugh Manes would later note that between 1931 and 1962, the LAPD served only 631 search warrants, about 20 a year, a shockingly low number. Police routinely responded to truly serious crimes by throwing dragnets around entire neighborhoods and “tossing” hotels, motels, and even private homes in search of potential suspects. Yet in its 1949 decision
Wolf v. Colorado
, the court reiterated its opinion that the exclusionary rule did
not
apply to local law enforcement agencies.

Of course, not every method was legal. Federal statutes prohibited wiretapping, as did California state law. The prohibition was absolute: No provision was provided for law enforcement agencies to seek court permission to tap a phone line. Parker understandably viewed this as a major problem. But the department did have a work-around; it simply broke into people’s homes and businesses and installed dictographs. The police department reasoned that since these were stand-alone recording devices that did not involve “tapping” a phone line, they were legal, end of story. The courts agreed—until November 1953, when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of
Irvine v. California
.

The case involved a suspected bookmaker (Irvine) who’d been targeted by the Long Beach Police Department. Officers had brought in a locksmith to make copies of the man’s house keys, entered his house, and then installed a dictograph in his bedroom closet—all without a search warrant. The evidence obtained from the “bug” was the basis of the man’s subsequent conviction. During his first trial in state court, the bookmaker had argued that by breaking into his house without a warrant, police had violated his Fourth Amendment rights to be safe from unreasonable search and seizure. The state court disagreed, as did the state appeals court. So Irvine petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, successfully.

On February 8, 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling. It noted that repeatedly entering the petitioner’s home without a warrant “was a trespass and probably a burglary.” The majority opinion described dictographs as “frightening instruments of surveillance and invasion of privacy, whether [used] by the policeman, the blackmailer, or the busybody.

“That officers of the law would break and enter a home, secrete such a device, even in a bedroom, and listen to the conversation of the occupants for over a month would be almost incredible if it were not admitted,” the majority continued. “Few police measures have come to our attention that more flagrantly, deliberately, and persistently violated the fundamental principle declared by the Fourth Amendment as a restriction on the Federal Government.” But the court nonetheless concluded that this restriction was one that applied only to the federal government.

“[I]n a prosecution in a State Court for a State crime, the Fourth Amendment does not forbid the admission of evidence obtained by an unreasonable search and seizure,” wrote Justice Robert Jackson in the 5-4 majority decision. As a result, the court declined to overturn the conviction. However, in what Earl Warren biographer Jim Newton describes as the “extraordinary” final paragraph of the opinion, Justice Jackson and Chief Justice Warren took the highly unusual step of noting that federal law allowed for the prosecution of police officers who, acting under color of authority, willfully deprived a person of a federal right such as the right to be secure in one’s home. The two justices then directed the court clerk to forward a copy of the record in this case, together with a copy of this opinion, to the U.S. attorney general for possible prosecution.