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Dragnet, 1951-1959

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        On August 9, 1950, William H. Parker, took over as LAPD Chief of Police. Decades before Parker's rise to Chief the LAPD was infamous for its rampant corruption and scandals, including their role in the June 1943 Zoot Suit Riots and the Brenda Allen scandal, as well as two national murder cases in the Sleep Lagoon Murder and the Black Dahlia case. Throughout the twentieth century, and particularly in the 1940s Mexicans, African Americans, and the Japanese were widely repudiated by the media and arrested by the LAPD. 
       Parker looked to change the narrative of LAPD corruption and Dragnet assisted in such efforts. The principal character of the show was Sergeant Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb, became the household example of the professional, law-abiding policeman. Sergeant Friday's famous catchphrase, "Just the facts," embodied the antithesis of the corrupt policeman. 
      Dragnet however, was anything but reality. Although, Parker and Dragnet, helped to change the mainstream media's narrative of the LAPD, the force continued its criminalization and brutality of racial minorities. During Christmas of 1951, less than ten days after the first episode of Dragnet, LAPD officers took Latino and white civilians that had been arrested the night prior and brutally beat them in an incident known as "Bloody Christmas." To clean up the force, post-Bloody Christmas, Parker pushed for more control of the department and engaged in a militaristic form of law and order policing. For years many residents maintained that Parker recruited officers from the South, many of whom were racist. Latino and African American accusations of police brutality/discrimination, continued throughout the run of Dragnet and the rein of Parker.
    Dragnet's original run ended in 1959. The myth of Jack Webb, the "just the facts" law-abiding policeman, would be shattered in the coming years. Throughout the 1960s, through a television lens, millions of Americans saw cities all over the countries burn as firey revolutions against racialized policing took place in Newark, Detroit, Harlem, and in 1965 Watts, Dragnet's and Parker's, very own backyard. For many white Americans in particular, who admired the integrity of Jack Webb and respected the badge, these rebellions shocked and angered them. For African Americans, those in particular who lived in the South, these insurrections that took place on the west, midwest and the east coast against the police, debunked the image of the west and the north, as a utopia, free from discrimination and racism. According to future LAPD Chief of Police Bernard Parks, whose family moved from Texas to Los Angeles during the Great Migration, "The Watts Riot was one of the first major events in the city of LA that was caught on TV. People who grew up looking at those kinds of activities in the South, they thought that's where the racial divide was. The only thing that was missing in LA, there weren't dogs."

This page has paths:

  1. Blinding Race: Television in the Civil Rights Era, 1948-1965 Phil Ethington
  2. Television Timeline Leonard Butingan

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  1. 1950s Phil Ethington