William H. Parker (police officer)

William Henry Parker III (June 21, 1905 – July 16, 1966) was an American law enforcement officer who was Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) from 1950 to 1966.The Parker family migrated to Los Angeles, California, in 1922, for better opportunities, when the city was advertised as the "white spot of America" during that period.[1] Despite this advertisement, the Parker family were in a clear minority in the distinctly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Los Angeles, due to their Catholicism.He attained the rank of captain as a planner and organizer of prisoner detention and policing in Sardinia, Normandy, Munich, and Frankfurt.While accuracy was a major goal of Dragnet, Webb was a strong advocate of the LAPD and stayed away from any story that showed any measure of police incompetence or corruption.Parker's experience with the numerically larger force of his early career led him to judge that fewer but more professional officers would mean less corruption.Parker used elements of the reserve force such as the Organized Crime and Intelligence Division of the LAPD to keep tabs on politicians and their suspected mafia syndicate allies, as well as the notoriously corrupt and narcotic-ridden Hollywood movie industry and its celebrities."[11] Parker was also known to publicly make callous and racist remarks towards minorities, African-Americans especially, and he largely refused to hire black police officers.For five days, businesses and stores were burned or looted, civilians were killed or wounded while being caught in the crossfire, and sniping was frequent, before the rioters dispersed from committing more violence after the California Army National Guard took to the streets in supplementing the LAPD officers.With de facto oversight of the 1950s television series Dragnet, Parker disseminated his vision of professionalized policing across the United States.[17] Although it was demolished in 2019,[18] Parker Center lives on in popular media, with frequent appearances and mentions in the classic TV series Dragnet, Perry Mason, and Columbo, and in the films Blue Thunder and Inherent Vice.