Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
testified that the death was an accident and that there was “no need to make an investigation.” Except for Greenwood, the commission dutifully accepted the chief’s word.4 But even sycophants were sometimes unsettled by the actual man behind the mask of Old Testament rectitude.
Parker was “Whisky Bill”: an “obnoxious, sloppy, sarcastic drunk,” who regularly relied on his driver, future LAPD chief Daryl Gates, to rescue him from disgraceful situations. According to Domanick,
He slurred his words, stumbled in and out of cars, and sometimes had to be literally carried home. Awkwardly prancing about shaking his arms doing a Sioux Indian dance he’d learned in his youth in South Dakota, or regularly throwing up after downing his pre-dinner bourbons in his house, among friends, was one thing. Showing up late, hung-over, and still drunk to review the Rose Parade with the mayor, and then giggling uncontrollably, quite another.5
But, like a movie star, he had a professional publicity bureau to safeguard his public image.
Dragnet had started as a radio show during the administration of Parker’s immediate predecessor, temporary chief William Worton (a Marine general with extensive experience in intelligence and espionage). Parker was initially wary of the show but also saw the opportunity to publicize his views on law and order. So when Jack Webb, the originator and star of the show, won network approval to produce both television and radio versions, Parker offered unlimited LAPD cooperation in production if Webb allowed the department’s Public Information Division (PID) to vet the scripts. Parker kept Webb on a short leash—forcing him, for instance, to never use the word “cop,” which the chief regarded as derogatory. In addition, adds Domanick, “the advisors closely examined the script to guarantee that the LAPD officers on Dragnet were ethical, efficient, terse and white.” It quickly became one of the top television programs of the 1950s and the template for a succession of television procedurals (twenty-five shows in all) and movies that exalted not only the LAPD macho ethos but also its icy and unnerving attitude toward the general citizenry.6
In addition to Hollywood, the PID—a unit of twenty permanent assigned officers—worked closely and often intimidatingly with the press: the Hearst-owned Examiner published an annual LAPD supplement lauding the chief and his men. Look magazine was persuaded to do a photo essay on the skirt-clad LAPD women, in which their marksmanship and homemaking abilities were equally stressed. There were even LAPD fashion shows. The PID also solicited articles on topics like the wonderful architecture of the LA Police Academy.7 Parker, who insisted on an above-average IQ as an admission requirement for the academy, also made good use of literary talent on the force. Just as he himself had been the speechwriter for Chief James Davis in the 1930s, he now made a young second-generation cop, Gene Roddenberry, his chief speechwriter and script consultant. In 1957 Roddenberry resigned to write full time for television, and legend claims that Chief Parker was the model for Star Trek’s Mr. Spock—half alien, half human, with no sense of humor.8
An FBI agent assigned to monitor and report on Parker’s activities once described him as “a psychopath in his desire for publicity.” Undoubtedly. But the chief was also shrewdly selling the need for the LAPD. In several speeches published in academic journals during the mid 1950s, Parker expounded a surprisingly pessimistic doctrine of law enforcement, emphasizing that crime moved in cycles determined by socioeconomic factors beyond the power of the police to control: “Lacking the ability to remedy human imperfection, we must learn to live with it. The only way to safely live with it is to control it. Control, not correction, is the key.” He added that “police field deployment is not social agency activity …[it] is concerned with effect, not cause.” The public, however, chronically underestimated the prevalence of crime and placed naïve belief in sociological solutions such as the probation and youth services agencies that Parker scorned. The result was an unwillingness to properly finance and support tough policing. Parker’s remedy was that police reformers must intervene in the “creation of a market for professional law enforcement.”9
Generating this demand meant using the media to show that crime lurked in every crevice of urban society and was only held at bay by a “thin blue line” of hard-as-nails cops. Police critics, if they so dared, would have to pass through a gauntlet of irrefutable crime statistics scientifically amassed by police analysts. (Parker’s belief in letting no crime, however trivial, go unpunished anticipated the contemporary “broken windows” school of policing.) What went unsaid, of course, was that the easiest way to generate politically dramatic indices of criminality was through the use of dragnets, racial profiling, random traffic stops, raids on gay bars, warrantless home break-ins, and the promotion of ordinary misdemeanors to felonies whenever possible. The relentless, virtually industrialized policing of the southern and eastern districts of the city, as well as gay Hollywood, automatically became its own self-justification. Mob invaders from the East and Red conspirators were just the frosting on Parker’s cake. White-collar crime, meanwhile, was scarcely acknowledged.
The Scalp Collection
Parker, like his archenemy J. Edgar Hoover, was also a master extortionist. He had learned the black arts during his three years as an administrative assistant to corrupt and brutal Chief James Davis, for whom, according to Domanick, “he gathered information on the professional and personal lives of elected and appointed officials and prominent citizens.”10 One ranking veteran of the Parker era said that his boss employed a “Soviet model of intelligence—to collect as much as possible about any number of suspicious individuals because commanders never knew when the information could be useful.”11 One of his first acts in office was to expand the intelligence squad into a full division and later, in 1956, to establish a clearinghouse that shared with other law enforcement agencies the LAPD’s thousands of dossiers on subversives as well as mobsters, drug dealers and gamblers.12 Carlton Williams, the Times’s city hall correspondent and chief hatchet man for the Chandlers in local politics, also had access to the files and frequently used them against his paper’s opponents.13
Parker bugged everything: the city jail, all LAPD phone calls, city council offices, the hotel rooms of candidates, and private residences.14 He also made the sledgehammer LAPD standard equipment. His men routinely raided homes and businesses without warrant, knocking down doors and smashing everything inside. In a 1955 case, People v. Cahan, California Supreme Court Justice Roger Traynor expressed amazement at Parker’s warrantless empire of surveillance and his force’s enthusiasm for the destruction of suspects’ property. Parker raged against having his “hands tied” by the ruling against the LAPD in this case, but he continued, if more clandestinely, his illegal surveillance of politicians and suspected criminals.15
His scalp collection was impressive. At the beginning of his tenure, he had put a silver stake through the heart of public housing by exposing, in a televised hearing, Frank Wilkinson, the public relations officer of the LA Housing Authority, as a supposed Communist.16 In 1957 he attempted to destroy the political career of a woman named Ethel Narvid who worked for liberal Valley council member (later congressmember) James Corman. Parker claimed he had evidence that she was a Communist, but Corman, who had the moral backbone missing in many other members of the council, ignored the chief and made her his deputy. The significance of this otherwise-obscure episode, Domanick argues, is that it was a “sign of how closely Bill Parker was monitoring and influencing local political affairs that he would invest himself trying to defeat a staff member of a freshman on a fifteen-member city council.”17
He stalked bigger game the following year, during one of the most important elections in state history. Challenging generations of Republican control over the governorship, Democrat Pat Brown was locked in a bitter contest with US Senator William Knowland, an archconservative who was also sponsoring a right-to-work amendment on the ballot. In Southern California, Democratic National Committee member Paul Ziffren was Brown’s crucial liaison with Hollywood moguls and Jewish political donors. Two years earlier, Ziffren had urged Brown, then attorney general, to investigate Parker’s intelligence division for its rampant disregard of constitutional rights.18 The LAPD’s revenge was to pass on to the Knowland camp—probably via the Times’ Carlton Williams—information that Ziffren,