Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,863

This is the grave of William Parker.

The horrible racist violent cop scum William Parker was born in 1905 in Lead, South Dakota. He grew up in Deadwood. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1922, specifically for two interlocking reasons. The first was that it was a big growth town with a lot of economic opportunities. The second is that LA advertised itself as a white city and that is what the Parker also wanted–lots of money, whites in clear power. In fact, the Parkers were Catholics and that was sketchy enough in the LA of this period. I mean, how white can a Catholic really be?

Parker had ambition and went to a bunch of colleges and then studied for a law degree, but he ended up taking a job with the Los Angeles Police Department in 1927. He did finally get that law degree in 1930, but decided to stay with the LAPD. He was a big union guy in an anti-union town. Of course cop unions have always gotten more of a pass from conservative city leaders since they are happy to beat up the other workers. So as Parker rose in the ranks, he became a big union activist and pushed for better wages and working conditions, with a lot of emphasis on job security guarantees. After fifteen years in the LAPD, Parker became a military cop in World War II. He was a captain and in charge of a lot of prisoner detention programs across Europe. In fact, he received a Purple Heart after being wounded in the Normandy invasion. The French government then gave him a Silver Star for his role in ensuring security in post-liberation Paris.

An ambitious man, Parker returned to the LAPD and spent the next five years rapidly rising in the ranks, becoming chief in 1950. Parker combined a reformist mentality when it came to administration with deep-seated racism. As such, he would engage in necessary reforms to stamp out internal corruption while telling his officers to have at it when it came to Blacks and Mexicans and pretty much anyone else they wanted to beat up.

On the former issue, Parker created a tremendously powerful institution. He defined his role as chief to make him the most powerful cop in the country not named J. Edgar Hoover. He was answerable to almost no one, including city politicians. This has made it hard for LA mayors to control the LAPD almost to the present. He was a believer in the idea of cops as military peacekeepers, basically taking his wartime experience and applying it to American city. He also pushed LAPD propaganda on Hollywood, leading to cop shows that made the police look good, something that American viewers love to the present, usually old people watching CBS. He cut the size of the force, getting rid of the street beat cops. Instead, he invested in military hardware. That meant the cops were less in the neighborhoods and more a military force occupying poorer parts of the city, which is exactly how Parker saw it. Also, Parker did reform the corruption but only to the point to where he got rid of the parts he didn’t find useful. It was still quite useful in terms of special units of the forces and to keep tabs on organized crime and Hollywood.

But really, we remember Parker for being an open racist. While he did desegregate the LAPD under political pressure in 1962, that was very limited. He loved using racial epithets. He publicly denied segregation was a problem in the city. In 1960, he had told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “There is no segregation or integration problem in this community, in my opinion, and I have been here since 1922.” And then he went on to claim that Blacks commit crimes at 11 times the rates of other races and that other cities were secretly dumping their Black people on poor little Los Angeles. His cops could beat the shit out any of Black person they wanted at basically any time. This is of course what laid the groundwork for the Watts explosion in 1965. The proximate cause of this was relatively normal policing. A guy gets pulled over for drunk driving. He resists, the cops act. But this quickly exploded in a community sick of its police force and its police chief treating it like Bull Connor did in Birmingham.

Parker is said to have coined the term “the thin blue line,” the cops protecting good society from the evil criminals. It’s hard to see a more damaging impact on American life than this. Every Blue Lives Matter flag after the rise of Black Lives Matter to protest Parker’s descendants is a fascist symbol that represents everything Parker stood for. The entire idea of the cops as the only thing protecting society from chaos is nonsense anyway; the cops are usually as much the criminals as the actual criminals. None of this is to say that criminality doesn’t exist or that police forces of some kind are not necessary; certain BLM activists did a hell of a job alienating larger reform coalitions through the abolish the police rhetoric. But if you are facing William Parker and his types, can’t you see why some would call for police abolition? These are the real gangsters.

Parker went to Governor Pat Brown immediately after the Watts riots started. He told Brown this was like facing the Vietcong, which again says all you need to know about how Parker thought about the people he was supposedly protecting in his job. He got Brown to call in the National Guard. Parker arrested every Black person he could find, for whatever reason. Eventually, the riots did cease, but Parker most certainly did not help.

In 1992, the journalist David Shaw wrote this about Parker in the LA Times:

“When Parker referred to black participants in the Watts riots as behaving like ‘monkeys in a zoo,’ a Times story later charitably characterized this as an ‘obviously unintentional but unfortunate remark.’ During the riots, Parker also said, on television: ‘It is estimated that by 1970, 45% of the metropolitan area of Los Angeles will be Negro. … 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.’ Earlier in his tenure, Parker attributed criminal activity among Latinos to their ‘not being too far removed from the wild tribes of … the inner mountains of Mexico.'”

Luckily, Parker didn’t hang around much after Watts. He had a heart attack the next year and died. The best part is that it was at an event to honor him. Sometimes, the bad do die young. He was 61 years old.

Amazingly, Gene Roddenberry modeled the Spock character in Star Trek after his good buddy, William Parker.

William Parker is buried in San Fernando Mission Cemetery, Mission Hills, California.

If you would like this series to visit other cops, and what a lovely group of people they are, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Morgan Earp is in Colton, California and John Frank Oldfield is in Athens, Ohio. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.