Bloody Christmas

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Bloody Christmas refers to the controversy surrounding the brutal beating of seven young Latino men by about fifty members of the Los Angeles Police Department while the young men were in police custody on Christmas day, 1951. The men had been rounded up after fighting with some of the officers at a bar in Elysian Park. The new police chief, William H. Parker, had just begun a reform campaign based on the idea of police professionalism and autonomy from civilian control; Bloody Christmas threatened to disrupt that campaign, as Latin-American activists called for police accountability to civilian authority. Eight officers were indicted in the scandal. The event was later portrayed in James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential.

[edit] Further reading

• Edward J. Escobar, "Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism: The Los Angeles Police Department, Mexican Americans, and Police Reform in the 1950s," Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 2, (2003), 171-199.