¶ … Los Angeles Police Department is one of the city agencies that reaches across the southland and touches the lives of all citizens. Over the course of the 20th century, the LAPD has often become a symbol of racial and class politics in the city. Do you think this is a useful way of thinking about the LAPD? What events in the history of Los Angeles might you use the LAPD to explain? What other agencies or forces in the city might complement the LAPD or offer and alternative way of thinking about the city?
I think it is useful to discuss the LAPD as a symbol of racial and class politics, but that it should also be discussed in terms of power structures within the city, as the police in Los Angeles have evolved with the city, especially under Bill Parker, who clashed with the mob and men like Mickey Cohen as he cemented power for himself. The Watts Riot, for example, is one example in which we can better understand the LAPD. The police had had a history of roughing up minorities and so there was much distrust between the power elites (whites) and the blacks, Hispanics, etc. Parker embodied the white elitism and Puritanism that festered beneath the city. At the same time, the lower class caste (blacks, Hispanics) had to contend with racism and suspicion and by mid-century, the issues of segregation, white supremacy, radicalism, and assertiveness on the part of the Negro were coming to the fore. When the LAPD incited another riot (the Watts Riot) by clashing with local blacks, the city's racial and political tensions quickly came to the surface.
The role of the underworld, the relationship between organized crime, the political bosses, and the LAPD is something that can help shed light on both the city and its evolution and the police force and its development. In its early days, there was more corruption and the police department was...
Under Parker, the force began to tighten as Parker began to assert more control within the city. This was in a way both good and bad for the city because it both resulted in a crackdown on crime and in a push-back by citizens who fight that their rights and freedoms were being encroached upon. Thus, another agency within Los Angeles that might offer an alternative way of thinking about the city might be something like the NAACP.
Question/Section #2: You travel to Los Angeles in the 1920's. You could be a man, woman, or child. You could be from the Midwest, Mexico, or anywhere else you choose. What is your experience of Los Angeles over the next 40-50 years?
Arriving in Los Angeles in the 1920s from the Midwest as a man, I am first struck by the seeming lawlessness of the city. But then again, the 20s were known as the "lawless decade," so this should not be so surprising. Hollywood stars and starlets are always in the news which loves to type up scandals for the people on the street. Even the mob bosses are stars in Los Angeles, and one can read about men like Bugsy Siegel.
But over the next 40-50 years, things will change in Los Angeles. Bill Parker will become Chief of Police and reform the police department in ways that some like and others don't. I myself stick to the white part of town which is fine because that is what most ethnicities do: they stick to the communities in which they are comfortable. Los Angeles is very segregated that way and stays that way.
But one thing that I pay attention to is the agriculture business and the water rights. Also the freeways that came into the city in the 1950s, and the "romance" that everyone associated with the city. Writers like Raymond Chandler and his fiction books about private detectives and damsels in distress: it made sense from a Hollywood…
