Portland police waged ‘crime war’ in 1947 with roving shotgun squads, bridge blockades, but violence raged on

The photograph looks like a publicity still from the old “Untouchables” TV series. A band of beefy men in fedoras heft shotguns as they stand around a black sedan. Three of the men stare balefully at the camera.

But this was real life, a portrait of Portland’s signature “mobile shotgun squad” in 1947.

The roving team’s call to action came from Portland Police Chief Leon V. Jenkins’ decision to take “unprecedented steps” in response to a “postwar crime wave” in the city. This included putting all officers on 12-hour shifts and setting up blockades at bridges and other main roads.

The police force’s five “shotgun squads,” deployed in the most powerful cars in the bureau’s fleet, would be the “greatest threat to safecrackers and fast-moving hold-up men,” Jenkins said.

The Oregon Journal called the plan an aggressive ploy to win a burgeoning “crime war.”

Clearly, something had to be done. The end of World War II had sent the U.S. economy yo-yoing, falling as soldiers returned home en masse to compete for jobs, bouncing up as the end of rationing led to an explosion of pent-up consumer demand.

Crime flourished at both ends of this arc, and Portland had ended up a popular destination for a “floating network of criminals” operating between Seattle and Mexico.

The police bureau’s extraordinary crime-prevention program came after a brazen murder and five armed holdups all occurred on a single January night. The overall police effort included designating more than 100 vehicles for patrol, including a mothballed armored car left over from Prohibition days and a seven-passenger Cadillac “borrowed” from Mayor Earl Riley.

“We intend on cracking down on the riffraff and hangers-on in the city,” a senior officer told the press. “Pool halls, beer joints and nightclubs will be closely checked in our drive to rid the city of its undesirables. Too many of these people came here during the war and too few have left the city.”

Problem was, some of the riffraff weren’t going anywhere no matter how many man-hours, check points and armored cars the police chief put into action.

The reason: Some of the cops were part of the problem – such as a rising young captain who allegedly worked for local vice king James Elkins on the side. That officer, 37-year-old Jim Purcell, was the man Jenkins had put in charge of the shotgun squads.

In the years that followed, Purcell, who died in 1968, would come to be known as “Diamond Jim” and face an assortment of corruption charges. Don DuPay, a detective in the police bureau in the 1960s and ’70s, would insist that Purcell ran “a trap line of prostitutes … to supplement his income.”

But in 1947, the newspapers heralded Purcell as one of the “college-boy cops who joined the force to make a career of it.” News coverage praised his role in the anti-crime push.

The crackdown, however, did not offer quick results. And then, two weeks into the effort, a merchant-ship captain named Frank Tatum was found with a broken neck at the bottom of an embankment. The man had been brutally beaten.

This latest murder captured the city’s interest. Reporters swarmed over the bars, flophouses and streets where Tatum had spent his last hours.

Evidence pointed to a former boxer known as Pat O’Day. As it turned out, O’Day was an enforcer for Elkins.

Officers brought the suspect in, and, with a reporter in attendance, Purcell led the interrogation. The captain sounded tough, but the questioning was soft and didn’t lead anywhere.

“Are you ready to make a statement?”

“Yes,” O’Day said.

“Do you want to make it in your own words?”

“No.”

“Would you like for us to ask you questions, then?”

“No.”

“Do you intend to make a statement?”

“No.”

Purcell nodded, then ordered that the man be taken to a cell for the night. O’Day, his hands still bruised and cleaved in a way that suggested they had been used to administer a beating, walked out of the interrogation room, whistling.

The police captain wasn’t done. In the days that followed, “Purcell took control of the [Tatum murder investigation], often interrogating witnesses himself and making no reports,” according to the 2014 book “Portland on the Take.”

But if Purcell was trying to hamstring the investigation, it didn’t work. Two men ultimately told police they had dumped Tatum’s body at O’Day’s direction after O’Day and Tatum had had a barroom fight. The medical examiner believed the ship captain was unconscious but still alive when he was thrown down the embankment. O’Day would be convicted of murder.

In April, with crime-war headlines still dominating the newspapers, the police bureau started to expand its efforts. In an operation headed by Purcell, officers set up a surprise overnight blockade of all downtown bridges “to determine just what kind of people are traveling around at such late hours of the night.” They stopped every car and questioned everyone inside.

At times this led to a fairly long backup at the bridges, and whenever vehicles turned around and headed back the way they had come, motorcycle officers peeled out, gave chase and pulled them over.

The goal, Purcell said, was “to make this town uncomfortable for anyone with criminal intentions.”

The next day the captain insisted the bureau had received numerous phone calls praising the police for undertaking the blockades.

After a few months, the showy crime crackdown fell away, the roadblocks lifted, the regular 8-hour shifts returned. There had been no drop in crime. But Jim Purcell, after weeks of being quoted in the newspapers, had a higher profile than ever.

In 1953, he became Portland’s police chief.