Part 10 (2/2)
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 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 rea.s.serted 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 p.a.w.nshops, 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 friends.h.i.+p with Irwin. Slowly, Chief Parker was gaining the upper hand.
POULSON STRUGGLED in his dealings with the chief. Parker prided himself on his a.n.a.lytic 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 subst.i.tutes. 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 cla.s.sic 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 sanct.i.ty 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 lat.i.tude 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 Wolf v. Colorado, the court reiterated its opinion that the exclusionary rule did not not apply to local law enforcement agencies. 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 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 pet.i.tioned 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 pet.i.tioner's home without a warrant ”was a trespa.s.s 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.
Parker was dumbfounded-and outraged. The highest court in the land had essentially described one of the most valuable tools in law enforcement-the dictograph-as something evil. In Parker's opinion, this description was incorrect and, in light of dictographs' long history as useful law enforcement tools, bizarre.
”Since the advent of appropriate electronic devices, the police of this state have utilized such devices to gather information and evidence concerning criminal activities,” Parker responded three months later, in a speech at the Biltmore Hotel marking National Crime Prevention Week. He insisted that they did so in ways that were tightly controlled. Section 6539(h) of the California Penal Code allowed dictographs only when expressly authorized by the head of a police force or by the district attorney. The evidence thus obtained, Parker insisted, had been invaluable in the department's fight against organized crime: A reputed overlord of crime in this area is now serving a term in a federal prison as a result of a prosecution in which information obtained through the use of dictographic equipment contributed materially. Two reputed members of the Mafia, who escaped federal prosecution for narcotic violations when a key witness against them was found murdered, were recently convicted of crimes in the courts of this state based upon evidence obtained through a dictograph installation. The reputed head of the local Mafia is now awaiting deportation, largely as the result of a local conviction obtained through the use of a dictographic installation. One such installation alone aided our department in solving forty-three serious crimes.
If anything, Parker continued, California's total ban on wiretapping was too restrictive. Attempts by Parker and other chiefs to create a mechanism that would allow them to ask a court for permission to intercept telegraphs and tap telephones based on probable cause had stalled in the legislature, creating what Parker described in one speech as providing ”a Yalu river sanctuary within the vast telegraphic and telephonic communications network of the United States within which to plan and transact their illegal activities with impunity.” Parker's allusion-a reference to the river redoubt from which the Chinese Army had attacked U.S. forces during the Korean War-could hardly have been more pointed.
The position of Justice Jackson and Chief Justice Earl Warren must have been particularly galling. As California's attorney general, Warren had not hesitated to brush aside legalistic objections in his pursuit of justice (most notably, when he personally directed a police raid on Tony Cornero's gambling s.h.i.+p, the SS Rex Rex, despite a court ruling that it was operating outside of California's territorial waters). Yet now, as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Warren seemed intent on imposing unprecedented new restrictions on law enforcement. The timing, in Parker's opinion, was terrible. Between 1950 and 1953, the LAPD had actually become smaller as Los Angeles grew. The city's crime rate was growing at an ever faster rate-a trend Parker described to the city council as ”a very frightening thing.” Yet instead of giving the police greater power, the judiciary was imposing new restrictions. Parker believed that by criticizing the use of dictographs (which have ”solved countless serious crimes”), the court was raising the prospect that police officers might be prosecuted for what had long been standard operating procedure. In one speech, he asked his audience to consider the officer who responded to a call and saw a housewife, p.r.o.ne on the floor, a probable suicide attempt at death's very door. Any officer worth his salt would kick in the door and race the woman to the hospital to pump her stomach. Was this to be treated now as trespa.s.sing, kidnapping, and rape?
”Certainly society cannot expect the police to risk criminal prosecution when their only sin is the valid enforcement of the law as they have been led to understand the law,” Parker concluded.
This was a sensitive-and not entirely hypothetical-subject for Parker. For by his third year as chief, he himself had emerged as a major target of lawsuits. The first had come after the b.l.o.o.d.y Christmas beating. More serious was a 1951 lawsuit filed by civil rights attorney A. L. Wirin, lead attorney for the Southern California Civil Liberties Union. Since both the state and federal court systems were as yet unprepared to exclude evidence gathered illegally by local police departments, Wirin sought to shut down the LAPD's surveillance activities in another fas.h.i.+on-by enjoining the police department from using public money to illegally install dictographs. Parker once again detected the hand of Moscow. At a hearing, he blurted out his suspicions that the Minsk-born Wirin (whose initials stood for ”Abraham Lincoln”) was a Communist.
Wirin's attempts to rein in the LAPD's surveillance operations attracted broad sympathy-not least from the city's elected officials. That spring, two councilmen, Harold Harby and Ernest Debs, discovered that their work telephones had been wiretapped. Both pointed at the police. Parker vehemently denied the allegation, blaming the underworld instead. Given the history of wiretapping in City Hall, many doubted this denial. Just two days after the councilmen had accused the department of illegally listening in, the Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times reported that the new police administration building nearing completion around the corner from City Hall was chockablock with bugs and listening devices. This provided little rea.s.surance to the city's already fearful political establishment. reported that the new police administration building nearing completion around the corner from City Hall was chockablock with bugs and listening devices. This provided little rea.s.surance to the city's already fearful political establishment.
Chief Parker was determined to defend-and expand-his surveillance tools. To do so, he turned to the television show Dragnet Dragnet. By 1954, Dragnet Dragnet had become the second most popular television show in the country (after had become the second most popular television show in the country (after I Love Lucy) I Love Lucy). The radio version (which now aired Sunday nights) also continued to attract a large audience. NBC was eager to create a feature film-length version of the show. The LAPD was prepared to offer Jack Webb a particularly juicy case file to serve as the basis of the script-one that involved a spectacular gang murder-but it came with a catch. The case was solved only after the police turned to extreme tactics, including near-constant police hara.s.sment and constant surveillance. Webb accepted the deal. As a result, audiences were treated to a movie with an unusual hero-the LAPD intelligence division. With its a.s.sistance (and a skillfully placed bug), Webb cracked the case of a gangland hit-only to run into trouble in the courtroom. There, after underworld witnesses refused to testify, Friday expresses his frustration at being unable to use a wiretap too.
A female juror objects. ”How do we know that all you policemen wouldn't be running around listening to all our conversations?” she asks.
”We would if you talked murder,” Friday snaps back.
Even Parker supporters, such as the in-house publication of the archdiocese of Los Angeles, The Tidings The Tidings, were somewhat disconcerted by the film's depiction of harsh police tactics. But Parker insisted that such misgivings were misinformed.
”Far from being a threat to our freedom,” Parker wrote in the pages of the California Law Review California Law Review the following spring, ”the use of modern technological devices by the police may well be their most powerful tool in combating our internal enemies, and a vital necessity in the protection of our nation's security, harmony, and internal well-being.” the following spring, ”the use of modern technological devices by the police may well be their most powerful tool in combating our internal enemies, and a vital necessity in the protection of our nation's security, harmony, and internal well-being.”
In addition to trying to win public support for less restrictive wiretapping laws, Parker also sought broader legal protections for his officers. In the fall of 1954, Parker kicked off a campaign to persuade allies in the state legislature to pa.s.s a law s.h.i.+elding law enforcement officers from the threat of criminal prosecution or civil lawsuits for actions taken in the routine course of their work. But just weeks after Parker floated this proposal, state attorney general Pat Brown made an announcement that preempted Parker's efforts. Brown suggested that local district attorneys henceforth consider prosecuting police officers who broke into citizens' homes to install dictographs without a court order. Then, on April 27, 1955, the California Supreme Court suddenly and unexpectedly issued a ruling that threatened to destroy what Parker had so carefully built.
The case of Cahan v. California Cahan v. California bore a striking resemblance to bore a striking resemblance to Irvine Irvine. This time it was the LAPD that had broken into the property of a suspected bookmaker, thirty-one-year-old Charlie Cahan. He was a big-time bookie, with a clearinghouse near the Coliseum, an elaborate call-back system to avoid police detection, and a network of backup ”spots” across the city where debtors could place bets in person. The LAPD estimated that he was handling about $6 million a year, and his lifestyle showed it. According to an LAPD intelligence dossier, Cahan had ”concubines, liquor by the case, a lavish penthouse, Cadillacs.” Cahan had emerged from nowhere and become an important player virtually overnight. Many a.s.sumed he was paying for police protection. He wasn't. On the contrary, Chief Parker had instructed the intelligence division in no uncertain terms that he wanted ”this son of a b.i.t.c.h in jail.”
So the intelligence division sent a man disguised as a termite inspector into the building housing Cahan's accountants to install a dictograph. The recordings secured a conviction, and Cahan was fined $2,000, sentenced to nine days in prison, and given a five-year-probation. Cahan appealed the decision. An appeals court rejected it, but when Cahan took his case to the California Supreme Court, it was accepted. A narrow 4-3 majority threw out Cahan's conviction.
”We have been compelled to [void the conviction and impose new evidentiary guidelines] because other remedies have completely failed to secure compliance with const.i.tutional provisions on the part of police officers,” wrote Justice Roger Traynor in the majority opinion. He continued, ”The courts under the old rule have been constantly required to partic.i.p.ate in, and in effect condone, the lawless activities of law enforcement.”
Traynor served notice that such practices were now coming to an end. The court struck down a California law that allowed courts to accept evidence, regardless of the manner in which it was obtained. Henceforth evidence improperly acquired would be thrown out-period. This was a fairly extreme remedy. Few other states imposed the exclusionary rule in such a blanket fas.h.i.+on. But the court insisted that the stakes justified such a draconian remedy.
”Today one of the foremost concerns is the police state,” declared Justice Traynor bluntly. ”Recent history has demonstrated all too clearly how short the step is from lawless although efficient enforcement of the law to the stamping out of human rights.”
Parker's reaction was apoplectic. He described the ruling as ”a terrible blow to efficient law enforcement” and warned that the decision ”will probably set law enforcement back fifty years.”
”The positive implication drawn from the Cahan Cahan case is that activities of the police are a greater social menace than are the activities of the criminal,” he told the press. ”This, even as a suggestion, is terrifying.” State a.s.sistant attorney general Clarence Linn agreed, calling the ruling ”the Magna Carta of the criminal.” In a meeting with the case is that activities of the police are a greater social menace than are the activities of the criminal,” he told the press. ”This, even as a suggestion, is terrifying.” State a.s.sistant attorney general Clarence Linn agreed, calling the ruling ”the Magna Carta of the criminal.” In a meeting with the Mirror Mirror, the chief revealed that in the month following the Cahan Cahan decision, arrests had plummeted across the board: bookmaking arrests, down 42 percent; narcotics, down 38 percent; weapons, down 20 percent. A headline in the decision, arrests had plummeted across the board: bookmaking arrests, down 42 percent; narcotics, down 38 percent; weapons, down 20 percent. A headline in the Mirror-News Mirror-News captured the chief's sentiments perfectly: ”Criminals Laugh at L.A. Police, Says Chief. Underworld Rejoices in Ruling.” captured the chief's sentiments perfectly: ”Criminals Laugh at L.A. Police, Says Chief. Underworld Rejoices in Ruling.”
Cahan offended Parker on many levels. As an attorney, he believed the ruling was ill considered and flew in the face of the doctrine of offended Parker on many levels. As an attorney, he believed the ruling was ill considered and flew in the face of the doctrine of stare decisis stare decisis, which held that courts should generally stand by earlier decisions. As a lawman, he found it insulting. But the new restrictions imposed by the courts on the police also worried Parker for a more immediate reason. For on October 9, 1955, after three years, eight months, and sixteen days in the joint, Mickey Cohen walked out of prison a free man.
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