Police Must Clean Up L.A. Hoodlumism
Los Angeles Examiner
June 10, 1943

Riotous disturbances of the past week in Los Angeles by zoot suit hoodlums have inflicted a deep and humiliating wound on the reputation of the city.

Los Angeles has been disgraced, and it is up to Los Angeles to move with the utmost speed and firmness to retrieve its character as a peaceful and orderly community.

Whatever their origin or motivation, these criminal outbreaks are essentially a police problem.

They might have been, but were not prevented, by police action.

They can, however, be squelched by police action, and so they must be.

This is no time to engage in controversy or recrimination.

The urgent need of the moment is to concentrate all our powers of peace enforcement to disperse and crush the slightest attempts of mobs to exist or collect within the city....

The record already reveals killings, stabbings, and cases of innocent women having been molested by zoot suit gangsters....

Los Angeles, like all American cities, has a tremendous lot of hard work to do fighting and winning a real war.

There is no use anywhere, no justification possible, for wasted energy or belligerence wrongly directed.

LET US CLEAN UP THIS SHAMEFUL MESS IMMEDIATELY AND GO AHEAD WITH THE REALLY SERIOUS TASK THAT CONFRONTS US.