Authors: John Buntin
At 2 a.m. on the morning of August 18, just days after the violence had finally subsided, the LAPD launched an all-out attack on what it saw as the epicenter of the violence—the Muslim Temple at 5606 South Broadway, headquarters for the Los Angeles chapter of the Nation of Islam. The ostensible cause of the raid was an early-morning anonymous phone call to Newton Division, claiming that the Black Muslims were stockpiling
weapons. As the police were breaking down the door, they came under fire—or so they later claimed. Officers later explained that “pellets” had started “pounding” their cars. So the police opened fire. In all, somewhere between five hundred and a thousand rounds of ammunition slammed into the two-story stucco structure. Eventually, the occupants of the Temple signaled that they were ready to surrender. Fifty-nine Nation of Islam members were arrested. No guns were found. Three weeks later, a judge blamed the incident on the LAPD’s “imagination” and dismissed charges against the nineteen men charged with felony offenses. When African American councilman Billy Mills demanded that Parker come before the council to explain the raid, Parker refused, saying, “I suggest he read the City Charter and find out what his powers and limitations are.”
The following day, the
Los Angeles Times
noted with evident satisfaction that the “taboo” on white men entering the Temple “had been broken.” The paper further reported that while no guns had been found, the temple was full of seditious literature, including hundreds of leaflets that provocatively read, “Stop Police Brutality.” Police actions only bolstered the Black Muslims’ standing. Soon thereafter, Marquette Frye, the young man whose stop had sparked the Watts riots, joined the Nation of Islam.
THE STREETS of Watts weren’t the only place where the LAPD went on the offensive. During the riots, the ailing chief had at times withdrawn from command decisions. However, he had kept up a busy schedule of television appearances, during which he forcefully criticized the rioters and defended the department. Now that the riots were over, Parker was ferocious in defending his men’s performance and his own legacy. Instead of sulking or hiding, he launched a media blitz.
Watts was not a failure of the department, the chief insisted. What had happened was a bad Highway Patrol stop on a hot day that gave the Communist Party and its allies the opening they had long hoped for. It did not matter that the men with the bullhorns were later identified as members of local community groups or that the cars moving with suspicious ease through the combat zone almost certainly contained gang members, not Communist Party organizers. The LAPD had not failed. Nor had Chief William Parker. He had not missed black Los Angeles’s anger and alienation. On the contrary, Chief Parker maintained that Watts had proved him right.
As evidence of a large conspiracy failed to turn up, Chief Parker turned to another explanation—one that emphasized black migration, the civil rights movement, and mass psychology. He was not shy about making his
case. “A great deal of the courage of these rioters was based on the continuous attacks of civil rights organizations on the police,” declared Parker on
CBS Reports
later that month.
“They’re attempting to reach these groups … by catering to their emotions,” declared Parker (an emotional man who had no patience for that quality in others). “‘You’re dislocated, you’re abandoned; you’re abused due to color,’” Parker continued, mimicking and mocking the attitudes of civil rights supporters. The civil rights movement had unleashed the virus of civil disobedience—the belief that people “don’t have to obey the law because the law is unjust.” At the same time, a huge surge of black migration had “flooded a community that wasn’t prepared to meet them.” (Parker didn’t hide his own feelings about the matter: “We didn’t want these people to come in,” he told the panel.)
*
Both factors laid the foundations for the uprising. One thing was for certain: The LAPD was not to blame.
“I think we are almost sadistic in the way we’re trying to punish ourselves over this thing without realizing what we have destroyed is a sense of responsibility for our own actions,” continued Chief Parker. “We have developed a shallow materialist society where everyone is a victim of their environment and are therefore not to be blamed for anything…. If you want to continue to live in that society, good luck to you.”
On August 29, Parker appeared on
Meet the Press
, the most respected of the Sunday news shows. There he faced off against host Lawrence Spivak and journalists from NBC News,
Time
, and the
Washington Post
. The questioning was polite—Parker was introduced as the most respected law enforcement officer in the United States, after J. Edgar Hoover—but pointed. Parker was asked about the causes of the riots, the lack of black officers on the force, and the persistent allegations of police abuse against minorities. His responses were unyielding. The rioting was sparked by a botched arrest by the California Highway Patrol. The LAPD had only a handful of Negro lieutenants because it was hard to find qualified Negroes willing to work in such an underpaid, underappreciated profession. Isolated verbal abuse of minorities was perhaps a problem, but so was the fact that eight hundred of his officers had been physically assaulted in the performance of their duties during the course of the previous year.
The response to these appearances was overwhelmingly positive. Parker claimed that in the weeks following the riots and his media appearances, he
received 125,000 telegrams and letters—“ninety-nine percent of them favorable.” The city council, the American Legion, the Downtown Businessmen’s Association—virtually every major interest group in the city rushed to proclaim its admiration for Los Angeles’s indispensable chief of police.
CALIFORNIA Governor Pat Brown begged to differ. By 1965, Brown was an old foe of Parker’s, having clashed repeatedly with him over wiretaps, capital punishment, and other criminal justice issues. Brown suspected that frustration over discrimination and high unemployment was behind the riots, not Communist agitators or some spreading malaise of lawlessness. On August 19, he appointed an independent commission, the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, headed by former director of Central Intelligence John McCone, to examine the cause and course of the riots. Brown charged the commission with delivering a thorough report as quickly as possible. The commission heard directly from more than seventy-nine witnesses; its staff interviewed hundreds of people, including ninety arrested during the riots. Twenty-six consult ants queried another ten thousand people.
The testimony of many of the African Americans who appeared before the commission and Chief Parker, Police Commission president John Ferraro, and Mayor Yorty was strikingly at odds. Witnesses such as councilman Tom Bradley and state assemblyman Mervyn Dymally expressed some sympathy for the plight of law enforcement officers attempting to patrol a dangerous ghetto. Yet they also insisted that the LAPD was both too slow to enforce the law in black neighborhoods and, when it did act, too often did so disrespectfully—sometimes even brutally. Negroes, testified Assemblyman Dymally, “generally expected the worst from police and got it.”
Parker, Ferraro, and Yorty rejected this critique. In his testimony before the McCone Commission on September 17, Parker put forward his analysis of what had happened—to a strikingly sympathetic audience. According to Chief Parker, Watts reflected the general decline of law and order throughout the United States. Parker’s rambling testimony, with its strange third-person references to himself (e.g., Negro leaders “seem to think that if Parker can be destroyed officially, then they will have no more trouble in imposing their will upon the police of America … because nobody else will dare stand up” to them) would later be described by the historian Robert Fogelson as “bordering on the paranoid.” But McCone and most white Angelenos found it perfectly reasonable.
Civil rights leaders attacked Parker for provocative comments, particularly his “we’re on top and they’re on bottom” statement. Critics interpreted
this as an endorsement of the status quo. It was possible that Parker’s remarks in that particular instance were simply descriptive. But there is no mistaking the drift of Chief Parker’s comments. Despite his earlier experiences as a Catholic in an aggressively Protestant city, Parker had never been sympathetic to the civil rights movement. Its embrace of civil disobedience horrified him. He did not see the history of hundreds of years of legal oppression. He did not see the horrifying indignities that African Americans in his own department such as Vivian Strange or Tom Bradley (who once dressed up as a workman in order to go look at a house in a majority-white neighborhood he was considering buying so as not to draw unwanted attention) routinely faced. This was a tragic failure of empathy for the chief of a great African American city.
Yet for many years, Parker’s comments on race had a certain balance: He criticized civil disobedience but also disdained the “pseudoscience” of racism. He foresaw a time when “assimilation” would remove racial conflicts. But as the 1960s progressed, any sense of balance fell away. Bill Parker had denied that blacks in Los Angeles experienced racism in any significant way. Now he actively played on white fears of black and brown violence to rally support for the police department.
“It is estimated that by 1970,” he told viewers of ABC’s
Newsmaker
program on August 14, “forty-five percent of the metropolitan area will be Negro; that excludes the San Fernando Valley…. If you want any protection for your home and family, you’re going to have to get in and support a strong police department. If you don’t, come 1970, God help you!”
Given such comments, it is hardly surprising that Chief Parker’s relationship with his critics did not improve. Back in Los Angeles at a city council meeting in September, Councilman Bradley attempted to pin down Parker on the “shadowy organization” that Parker constantly (albeit elliptically) referred to in his talks about the Watts riots.
“Can you identify the organization?” Bradley asked the chief.
“I have my suspicions,” replied Parker. Then he turned the question around on Bradley. “Perhaps you can. You’re closer to those people.”
PARKER’S combative appearances belied his fragile health. That October, he returned to the Mayo Clinic, this time for heart surgery. In his absence, the department took a few small steps toward a less combative posture, assigning African American lieutenants to five critical divisions (Public Information, Newton, 77th Street, University, and Wilshire) to serve as community relations officers. But when rumors began to circulate
that Parker might be about to retire, Yorty urged him to return to the job.
On December 2, 1965, the day before Parker was scheduled to return to Los Angeles, the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots, which was known simply as the McCone Commission, issued its report. Written largely by commission vice chairman Warren Christopher, it attempted to tack between the two camps. The rioting was dismissed as the handiwork of a disgruntled few, not a mass uprising driven by legitimate concerns. As to whether the LAPD’s style of policing was to blame for the outbreak of violence, the McCone Commission report was coy. It reported “evidences [of] a deep and longstanding schism between a substantial portion of the Negro community and the Police Department,” and mentioned the frequent complaints of “police brutality” (a phrase the report placed in prophylactic quotation marks, lest the commission be accused of confirming that such things occurred). The report also noted that “generally speaking, the Negro community does not harbor the same angry feeling toward the Sheriff or his staff as it does toward the Los Angeles police.” Indeed, the McCone Commission correctly observed that “Chief of Police Parker appears to be the focal point of the criticism within the Negro community.”
“He is a man distrusted by most Negroes,” the report continued. “Many Negroes feel that he carries a deep hatred of the Negro community.”
But the commission raised these issues only to dismiss them. “Chief Parker’s statements to us and collateral evidence such as his record of fairness to Negro officers are inconsistent with his having such an attitude,” the commission declared. “Despite the depth of feeling against Chief Parker … he is recognized, even by many of his most vocal critics, as a capable Chief who directs an efficient police force that serves well this entire community.” This, of course, was precisely the proposition that many African Americans rejected. Christopher concluded the section on the policing with the Parkeresque declaration: “Our society is held together by respect for law.” The police, it continued, were “the thin thread” that bound our society together. “If police authority is destroyed… chaos might easily result.” The commission also echoed Parker’s rhetoric about the civil rights movement: “Throughout the nation unpunished violence and disobedience to law were widely reported and almost daily there were exhortations here and elsewhere to take the most extreme and illegal remedies to right a wide variety of wrongs, real and supposed.”
The report’s criticism of the Police Commission was more pointed. It noted, with wonder, that “no one, not a single witness, has criticized the
Board for the conduct of the police, although the Board is the final authority in such matters. We interpret this as evidence that the Board of Police Commissioners is not visibly exercising authority over the Department vested in it by the City Charter.” Yet the commission’s recommendations—that the Police Commission meet more frequently, request more staff, and get more involved, were strikingly naive. The Police Commission’s powerlessness was not simply a matter of its occasional meetings and limited resources. It also reflected a deliberate, decade-long strategy by Chief Parker to assert the prerogatives of the professional policeman over those of the casually involved citizen. A mere exhortation was hardly an effective remedy against as skilled a politician as Bill Parker.
To many on the left, the McCone Commission’s report was a bitter disappointment. A January 1966 assessment by the California advisory committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights criticized the report for ignoring warnings, such as the one sounded by assistant attorney general Howard Jewell, that the bitter conflict between Parker and civil rights leaders might well lead to riots. But to Parker, even mild criticism smacked of a personal attack.