Ditch Parker

Story Created: Apr 17, 2009 at 11:56 AM PST

Story Updated: Apr 17, 2009 at 11:56 AM PST

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At a time when the Los Angeles Police Department is taking significant strides toward repairing relationships with communities of color, tone-deaf is the most generous way to describe City Councilman Bernard Parks’ absurd proposal to keep the name of former chief William H. Parker on the soon-to-open new LAPD headquarters.

Parker, whose 16-year reign over the department began in 1950, was seen by many as a West Coast approximation of Bull Connor — and for good reason.

He took grinning pride in calling African-Americans “those people,” and once said in a press conference that Blacks “flooded [the] community” of South L.A., adding that “we didn’t ask these people to come there.”

His withering, unforgiving and bigoted view of urban African-Americans fostered a culture of racial insensitivity in the department, one that resulted in a legacy of mutual animosity. The example he set contributed directly to decades of racist police tactics that cost many Black lives, yet his sudden death in 1966 prompted city leaders to honor him by calling the new police headquarters Parker Center. Among his successors, only current LAPD Chief William Bratton (who opposes keeping the name Parker Center) has made a point of steering the department away from that ugly past.

Now Parks — himself a former LAPD chief, and one of only three African-Americans on the council — wants to stamp Parker’s name on the new building in the name of some ill-defined pursuit of “continuity.” He made a motion to do just that, and, incredibly, has even seen fit to put forth a feeble, quasi-defense Parker’s views, telling the L.A. Times this week that his offensive and inexcusable statements about African-Americans and Latinos were merely a part of “things that were contemporary and accepted” at that time.

We’ll leave the psychological analysis to the experts; but coming from a leader who represents the heaviest concentration of Black constituents in the city, it is at best disappointing to watch him offer rhetorical amnesty to a man whose world view caused what some still believe was irreparable harm to L.A. race relations. That he has remained intransigent on the matter, in the face of righteous public outrage, is a matter between Parks and citizens he represents.

At a time when even the slave-owning founders of the United States are (rightfully) being taken to task by historians for their racist views and practices, it is hard to see how anyone wins by extending a 21st century honor to someone who embraced a Jim Crow mentality long after the beginning of the civil rights movement.

Simply put, when Parks’ motion comes before the entire L.A. City Council next week, the only acceptable outcome is nothing less than resounding rejection.

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