By Glenn Souza
Retired senior detective, LAPD

Back in the late Middle Ages when I came on the job (1959), the Los Angeles Police Department was completely segregated and by any definition extremely racist. Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and Chief William H. Parker was god. (Former LAPD Chief) Daryl Gates was a sargeant in the chief's office and (former-mayor) Tom Bradley was a lieutenant out in the Wilshire Division...

In the old University Division (now Southwest) the police were feared by all... We were a mercenary army unofficially empowered to arrest anyone at any time for any cause. The most common was drunkenness or drinking in public view, but more exotic charges could always be approved by the detectives on probable cause. At every roll call, officers were required to record in their notebooks a string of recent robbery or burglary reports in which suspects were usually described as male Negroes, 25 to 30 years old, average height and weight, black hair and brown eyes. Sometimes the descriptions were refined to include porkpie hats or processed hair, but still, any report could describe half of the men in the division's area.

Heroin addiction was a big problem in the division's area and officers were under orders to book any "hype" (addict) that they saw. Fresh needle tracks meant an instant felony arrest and made for nice month-end recaps. Another easy FELONY arrest was a marijuana cigarette, and many careless smokers with a roach in plain view spent the night in the division jail. The nightwatch jailer was the vice principal of Manual Arts High School in the daytime, and he gave many youths a double dose of paternalistic oppression. (Want him teaching your kids?, Ed)

The rules were pretty strict...but there were some old Municipal Code ordinances that could be used (for an arrest), ancient and shaky as they might be... Black people could not venture north of Beverly or much west of La Brea after dark without strongly documented purpose. In Hollywood Division, a negro was an automatic "shake" or field interview with the resultant warrant check or match-up to some vague crime report. A favored location for these shakes was the call box at Outpost Canyon and Mulholland Drive. If there was absolutely no way to arrest the suspect, he was told to start walking...

The City's first race riots were at the Griffith Park merry-go-round in 1962 and 1963. The black youths of South-Central were told that they could enjoy the city parks freely, and they came by the busload on weekends and mixed with white citizens. This caused a lot of friction, and where there is enough friction, there is a fire. Black officers were brought in -- just loaned, not transferred -- to help... The civil unrest of the 60's was anathema to the conservative cops under the direction of Chief Parker... Once, when I was working undercover at a demonstration for some innocuous cause, I got thumped pretty good by a uniformed officer with an old hickory baton. It sure hurt and gave me just a glimmer of insight into what some people had to live with every day of their lives, just for thinking differently than we did or, worse yet, for just looking different.

Search and seizure laws had only recently been tightened by Supreme Court decisions and were decried as the end of police power. There were no Miranda or Escobedo rules for interrogation, and we used to laugh at British movie detectives with their exhortations of remaining silent. The way to get ahead in the department was to go along -- not necessarily to condone misconduct; just don't challenge the conventional wisdom, no matter how misguided it might be. Even better, find statistics and write reports justifying the status quo... Officers like Mark Fuhrman may be aberrations in the 1990s, but they were common in the 50s and some stayed until the 80s, passing on their infinite ignorance to the more suggestible followers on the force. Naive arrogance in high places was blind to racism but contributed much to the worship of a 50s chief who usually referred to black people as "nigras," and you know what that sounds like.

• Glenn Souza, the author, retired from the LAPD in 1984 as a senior detective in the Detective Headquarters Division. (Excerpted from the LA Times)