As Police Chief, Davis Was ‘Crazy Ed’

As chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, Ed Davis was an outspoken, hard-line conservative, whose pronouncement that aircraft hijackers should be hanged at the airport, along with other drastic statements, earned him the nickname “Crazy Ed.”

But as a state senator, Davis, 75, who announced Tuesday he will end his 12-year Senate career, quickly moved to erase that image. He mellowed into a pipe-smoking political maverick who offended fellow conservatives by championing homosexual rights and denouncing the influence of religious fundamentalists on the GOP.

“Everyone perceived Ed to be just a cop,” said state Sen. William Campbell (R-Hacienda Heights) in a 1986 interview. “They forgot one thing: He was the top cop. And you don’t get to be chief of the LAPD without . . . having a lot of smarts and . . . good political instincts.”

Politics was far from Davis’ mind when he joined the LAPD in 1940. A high school dropout, he finished his schooling in the Navy during World War II.

He had briefly considered becoming an Episcopal priest, but his first wife, Virginia, said she could not see herself married to “Father Ed,” so he gave up the idea, Davis once said. Davis was later divorced and married his current wife, Bobbie, in 1983.

“After the war, I heard that USC had a good school of public administration, so I signed up for classes, working full days at the department,” Davis said in 1973.

In the Navy, he said he noticed “that the guys who were giving orders all had college educations. They gave dumb orders, but they wore gold braid. I gave some thought to getting a college education so that I wouldn’t be pushed around by dummies who had college degrees.”

His college degree paid off when former Mayor Sam Yorty named him chief in 1969. During his 8 1/2-year tenure he delighted in making dramatic public statements.

Twice, Davis held news conferences with a handkerchief stuffed in his mouth because he was under a court-imposed gag order not to discuss a case. He often referred to Sacramento as “Disneyland North.” He once included in the department’s budget a submarine to intercept drug dealers at sea--which he later said was meant to be a joke on gullible reporters.

But his most famous statement came in 1972 after a rash of airline hijackings when he advocated that hijackers be arrested and immediately hanged at the airport “with due process of law.”

After retiring from the department in 1978, Davis ran unsuccessfully for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. In 1980, Davis was elected to the state Senate after spending a then-record $700,000 on his campaign, and devoted much of his time to law-and-order issues, introducing bills to extend the death penalty and reverse Supreme Court decisions limiting police power.

His support of a gay rights bill in 1984 threw fellow Republicans into paroxysms of disbelief. Davis replied that there were many kinds of conservatives--fiscal, national defense and others--including religious conservatives he derided as “theocrats,” who support rule by religious leaders.

He said he was “every kind of conservative but a theocrat. . . . We cannot take anyone’s religion and make that the law.”.

Davis never tired of firing off one-liners. On legislators, he said in 1988: “Hell, we don’t know what we’re doing. You’ve got to tell us what you want us to do.”