Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism: The Los Angeles Police Department, Mexican Americans, and Police Reform in the 1950s
Abstract
On December 25, 1951, approximately fifty Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers brutally beat seven young men in their custody, including five Mexican Americans. The ensuing controversy became known as Bloody Christmas. Mexican American activists demanded investigations into allegations of police brutality and LAPD accountability to civilian control. The LAPD's new chief, William Parker, however, had just launched a reform campaign based on the police professionalism model, which stressed police autonomy, particularly about internal discipline. Parker and his allies in city government stifled external investigations into department matters, vilified LAPD critics, and even ignored perjury by officers. They thus helped create an organizational culture that valued LAPD independence above the rule of law and led to the LAPD's estrangement from Mexican American and other minority communities.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Following demographic changes after World War II, Chief Parker released LAPD officers to engage in aggressive practices targeting the city's Black and Mexican American populations as inherently criminal.
“Following demographic changes after World War II, Chief Parker released LAPD officers to engage in aggressive practices targeting the city's Black and Mexican American populations as inherently criminal (Escobar 2003;Felker-Kantor 2018b).”
From To Protect and to Serve: Police, Power, and the Production of Inequality in the United States (2024) · cites this paper as Escobar 2003
The Bloody Christmas beating occurred not in spite of police professionalism, but because of it.
“However, Escobar notes, the Bloody Christmas beating “occurred not in spite of police professionalism, but because of it” (p.180).”
From To Protect and to Serve: Police, Power, and the Production of Inequality in the United States (2024) · cites this paper as Escobar 2003
The result was a police department more insulated from external oversight than before.
“The result was a police department more insulated from external oversight than before (Escobar 2003, pp. 173-74;Felker-Kantor 2018b).”
From To Protect and to Serve: Police, Power, and the Production of Inequality in the United States (2024) · cites this paper as Escobar 2003
Political autonomy and a war on crime approach created the conditions within which the police were free to police communities of color aggressively.
“Political autonomy and a “war on crime” approach, Escobar demonstrates, created the conditions within which the police were free to police communities of color aggressively.”
From To Protect and to Serve: Police, Power, and the Production of Inequality in the United States (2024) · cites this paper as Escobar 2003
Cited by
Sorted by citations
To Protect and to Serve: Police, Power, and the Production of Inequality in the United States
Felker-Kantor, M. (2024) · Crime and Justice · doi:10.1086/732194 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
- Authors
- Escobar, E. J.
- Corresponding author
- Escobar, Edward J.
- Venue
- Pacific Historical Review
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Published
- 2003-05-01
- Volume
- 72
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 171-199
- ISSN
- 0030-8684 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2018394111
- Cited by
- 23
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2024: 1 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 1 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 4.32
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Pacific Historical Review (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Policing Practices and Perceptions
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, History, and American Society
- Social Sciences › Law › Criminal Justice and Penology
- Keywords
- Los Angeles Police Department, police brutality, police professionalism, police reform, Mexican Americans, William Parker, police autonomy, civilian control, police accountability, organizational culture, police misconduct investigations, 1950s, Los Angeles
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
