Thursday, September 18, 2014
Page 7
PERSPECTIVES (Column)
Reporters Who Carried Guns: Did They Do So With a ‘Wink and a Nod’ From Police?
By ROGER M. GRACE
Fourth in a series
Newspaper reporters in Los Angeles in the days of Prohibition and gangsterism, and even later, before the time that William Parker pinned on the “Chief’s Badge” and cleaned up the town, were a pistol-packing corps.
The question I posed yesterday—and couldn’t offer a flat-out answer to—was whether a press badge was tantamount to a gun permit.
There are indications that it was.
Clark Secrest, a former newspaper editor and long-time badge collector, tells me:
“I have never seen a notation from California or elsewhere that the possession of a press credential badge implicitly or explicitly allowed a reporter to carry a gun, although certainly such might have been the case with a handshake and a wink.”
Court of Appeal Presiding Justice Norman Epstein of this district’s Div. Four has made reference in an opinion, in an unrelated context, to a “nod and wink.”
Credence is lent to a “wink” theory by a passage from Ralph McGill’s book, “The South and the Southerner.” Recounting his coverage of speeches, as a cub political reporter on the Nashville (Tenn.) Banner in the 1920s, he says:
“There were always policemen about. They knew that the reporters carried revolvers, and one of them, Sergeant Ed Wright, would walk up to me and ask, ‘What’s that bulge there at your waist?’ ‘An extra pencil, Sergeant,’ I’d reply. ‘Be careful and don’t let it shoot you in the foot,’ he’d say and go away laughing loudly.”
Roland Nethaway, in a Dec. 14, 1994 column distributed by Cox News Service, writes of days when police-press relationships were chummier:
“Police reporters used to be ‘on the job’ in much the same way as the police. We had special keys that let us into the back door of the police station where we roamed freely searching out juicy scraps in a futile attempt to fill the bottomless appetite of our drill sergeant city editors.
“An old-time reporter and former World War II vet once told me he never saw anything wrong with the annual cop-press party at the shooting range until the last one he attended.
“The weathered reporter asked a prisoner being kept busy fetching drinks for several reporters involved in a friendly game of craps what he did to land in jail. The prisoner gestured down to the reporters shouting at the dice and said that’s what he was doing when he got arrested.”
Here’s an announcement in the April 30, 1889 edition of the Washington (D.C.) Star of a sort not apt to be seen today:
|
|
Newspapers back then were the primary source of news, and they had power—far more so than today. So did police—whose powers in cities like Los Angeles were virtually unbridled. In the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, one faction with power and another faction with power were bound to be either in harmony or at war.
As between the local police force and the press corps, there was amity.
A Jan. 6, 1997 Los Angeles Times article, reflecting on the “Black Dahlia” murder 50 years earlier, observes that 1947 was part of “an era of cozier police-media relations” than at present. A Sept. 29, 1994 feature in that newspaper on the Police Museum terms a police reporter’s badge that’s on display “a reminder of those cozier days in the 1920s, when the department gave out badges even to journalists.”
A May 24, 1992 Times analytical piece by David Shaw is particularly illuminating:
Until the last 25 years or so, in Los Angeles as elsewhere, street cops and the reporters who wrote about them were generally friends, quasi-colleagues in many instances, good guys fighting together in a war against the bad guys. Many reporters carried badges. Some carried guns.
Cops helped reporters who got in a little trouble—even checked them into flophouses in Little Tokyo when they got drunk—and reporters helped cops by not writing anything that would embarrass them.
This syndrome was common everywhere, but it was especially entrenched in Los Angeles because of the long, cozy history of police-press relations and because of the longstanding attempt by the local press to depict the city in the most favorable light possible, as a sunny, secure, crime-free place to live and buy a home and build a business.
Norman (Jake) Jacoby, who covered the Los Angeles Police Department for more than 50 years, dating back to 1935, for City News Service and the now-defunct Herald-Express, can recall routinely drinking, partying and fishing with friends on the force. Eric Malnic, who came to work as a reporter for The Times in 1958, remembers the days when any Times reporter who got a traffic ticket from an LAPD officer would just give it to City Editor Taylor Trumbo. Trumbo would scrawl his initials on it, send it to police headquarters and “that was the last you heard of that,” Malnic said.
Bill Hazlett, who covered the police for newspapers in Wichita, Kan., Denver, Long Beach and Los Angeles before his death in 1983, sometimes seemed to have almost as many people from law enforcement as from the press at his annual New Year’s Eve party, and he loved sharing stories with them about his experiences with his cop pals.
He told about the police captain who once gave him a gun and made him part of a posse chasing a cop killer and he bragged about going on stakeouts and raids with police—and about turning a stickup man over to police after the man confessed to him.
In an April 16, 1975 piece, Shaw tells of a reporter for a major midwest newspaper reminiscing about the days when the police station press room was “the only place one could get a drink on a Sunday night,” where police and reporters played cards and exchanged tales.
“The same reporter,” Shaw says, “remembers telling a cop over a drink one night that he had been robbed twice.
“ ‘He walked into the other room and came out with a sawed-off High Standard .22-caliber revolver with the serial numbers filed off’ the reporter says. ‘He tossed it in my lap and said, ‘Next time, kill the bastard!’ ”
Shaw says the reporter told him of the officer’s advice: to wait until the robber started to leave and shoot him in the back, “[g]et his gun and throw it away, then get his hand all over your gun and tell the police it was his and you took it away from him.’ ”
“Coziness” extended into the 1950s. In his book, “Chief: My Life in the LAPD,” Daryl Gates (police chief from 1978-92, now deceased), says:
“In a move that hardly improved his popularity, [Chief William H.] Parker had the slot machines in the [Greater] Los Angeles Press Club taken out. They were the only slot machines in California, where gambling was illegal.”
The three slot machines ordered seized by Parker (chief from 1950-66) had been donated to the Press Club. Steve Harvey’s May 19, 2005 column in the Times identifies the donor: the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which had itself confiscated the illegal devices.
Greater deference was accorded by law enforcement officers to reporters covering the police beat than to other journalists. Secrest, in a July, 2004 article in Editor & Publisher, notes:
“…San Francisco of the early 20th century issued fancy badges specifically for crime reporters. This hand-engraved badge is inlaid with enameled lettering.”
Special deference is understandable, given that reporters on that beat were personally known to officers.
Hugh Baillie’s June 29, 1959 column renders this all the more understandable. When police station alarms sounded, Baille brings to mind, reporters from the various newspapers would take turns going off with the officers who responded, and notes:
“You made yourself useful when you went with the police. They didn’t have sirens in those days, they had bells; and the reporter sat beside the driver and rang the bell as the wagon rattled through town.
“When you arrived, you got out and lent a hand, which usually consisted of holding one end of the stretcher.”
Camaraderie between police and press is one thing. But would police officers have so consistently turned a blind eye to reporters carrying firearms without permits as to instill a confidence in them that a press badge served as sufficient authority?
The reality is that law in Los Angeles in the first part of the 20th Century was both written and unwritten, with official fiats or whispered edicts sometimes superseding ordinances…and blatant lawlessness often reigning supreme.
John Buntin’s 2009 book, “L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City,” provides an account of a patrolman in the late 1920s, freshly emerged from the status of a rookie, who apprehended a drunk driver and hauled him to the station. The desk sergeant was reluctant to book the man; he was a police reporter for the Los Angeles Daily News (unrelated to today’s newspaper of the same name).
The patrolman was insistent that the man be booked; he was; he was tried and (in light of a parade of witnesses attesting to his good character) acquitted.
The officer was William H. Parker.
Buntin comments:
“Today the police beat is seen as a place where novice reporters go to learn the craft—the bottom of the journalistic food chain. Not so in the 1920s. In those pretelevision days, crime was the sexiest beat in journalism, and the men (and occasionally women) who covered it were important figures. Not only were they star reporters, they also frequently functioned as political hatchet men for their publishers (a job greatly facilitated by reporters’ free access to police files). Reporters supplemented their writing and (ahem) ‘research’ with booze, poker, and occasionally extortion (publicity being something that many people were willing to pay to avoid). Veteran officers rarely crossed them.”
And vice versa.
Although corruption in Los Angeles is generally associated with the regime of Mayor Frank Shaw—who was elected in 1933, reelected in 1937, and recalled in 1938—it did not instantly materialize upon Shaw taking office. It had long been in place.
Mitchel P. Roth, in his 2001 book, “Historical Dictionary of Law Enforcement,” writes:
“During the Prohibition era of the 1920s and 1930s, corruption reached into the highest levels of the department, and despite attempts by Chief August Vollmer (1923–1924) to reform the force, Depression- and Prohibition-related corruption pervaded city politics unabated….[T]he tumultuous years following Vollmer’s stint as police chief continued to be characterized by political patronage and corruption.”
Shaw’s immediate predecessor was John Clinton Porter. Elected in 1929, he was a supposed “reform” candidate. But so, too, was Shaw in running four years later, defeating him for reelection.
A July, 1932 article in the National Municipal Review points out that in Los Angeles, “[t]he press has repeatedly charged that speakeasies, gambling, and the general activities of the under-world openly flourish in sight of the city hall.”
In the 2005 book, “Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron’s Urban Reform Revival, 1938-1953,” Tom Sitton notes that in Porter’s 1929 campaign, “[v]ice control had been a major election issue,” yet “little was done to eradicate vice and payoffs to police officers.”
L.A. was a free-wheeling burgh.
So, where a 1931 Times account, quoted yesterday, sets forth the statement by a defendant, without questioning it, that a press badge authorized his carrying of a gun, it can’t be lightly dismissed. It might well be assumed that if the assertion was flat-out false, the writer—who presumably would have held or qualified for such a badge—would have known better, and included language casting doubt on the verity of the assertion…or that the reporter on the rewrite desk, who reviewed the copy, would have done some editing.
It is clear that some reporters covering the police beat in Los Angeles in the 1920s to 1940s did carry concealed weapons. Assuming they lacked permits, they acted unlawfully—yet, apparently secure in the knowledge that it was safe entirely for them to do so.
FOOTNOTE: Porter is a much-overlooked, yet intriguing, figure in Los Angeles’s history. He was a tea-totaler, a prig, and, most significantly, a bigot. He had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
|
|
|
JOHN C. PORTER 1930 Los Angeles Times photograph, used by permission of UCLA Library |
As mayor, he reportedly said, in response to a question as to why he would not appoint an African American to the Police Commission: “I cannot appoint a Negro on that commission, as I could not appoint a Catholic or a Jew or a member of other religious groups to certain commissions.”
He utterly lacked political savvy. An ill-fated recall election was sparked, in part, by his internationally noted refusal to join in a wine toast while on a junket in France with other mayors of U.S. cities. (Accounts differ as to whether the toast was to the Republic of France or, as reported by Time Magazine, the president of France.)
Porter rationalized that he was a United States citizen, obliged to obey the U.S. Constitution wherever he was, and that 18th Amendment compelled abstinence on his part even in Paris.
Copyright 2014, Metropolitan News Company