GANGSTERS AND COPS

A former police officer offers a history of the Los Angeles Police Department from its founding in 1869 to the 1960s.

The LAPD has always been a scandal-plagued institution; its first chief was shot dead by one of his own officers during an argument over the reward money for the capture of a woman accused of stealing jewelry. The department, former LA cop Bultema writes, became “a breeding ground for corruption—casting a dark shadow over the department that did not lift for decades.” Tracing the LAPD’s evolution from its origins in what was then a crime-ridden frontier outpost—“ever-present lynch mobs” made “bodies hanging from trees and ranch posts” a common sight—the author provides plenty of detail and deft turns of phrase. One city street in the early 1900s “doubled as a racetrack, except there were no jockeys but scantily dressed prostitutes,” he notes at one point; at another, he says that one police chief “possessed all the characteristics of a man best suited for anything but the command of LAPD.” The corruption was so blatant, he writes, that one police captain solicited a bribe from a gangster by saying, “I have a ranch to pay for.” These earlier sections offer an engaging history of a troubled department. However, the book’s chapters covering the post-Prohibition LAPD egregiously minimize Chief James E. Davis’ use of the lawless Red Squad to infiltrate and harass labor unions as simply “following specific directives” from the LA mayor. Even more shocking is the adulation for Chief William H. Parker, whom Bultema extols for having “transformed the LAPD into an efficient, technologically advanced, and incorruptible operation” during his tenure from 1950 to 1966; there’s no mention of how, as journalists such as Joe Domanick have shown, Parker’s LAPD terrorized the city’s minority residents, fueling resentment that erupted in the Watts riots of 1965—or of how the department continued to be corrupted by money, racism, and power, as in the 1998-2000 Rampart Division scandal. It results in a work whose claims are hard to swallow.

A sometimes-compelling but ultimately biased account of the LAPD’s past.