Vulcan Police Force - Star Trek's Mister Spock Was Inspired By LAPD Cop
Police Chief William Parker Inspired Gene Roddenberry To Create His Most Famous Alien, Leonard Nimoy's Spock
Mister Spock dutifully on foot patrol walking his tough beat on the mean streets as an Earth based cop? Bridge to Sickbay, Emergency! WTF? Yup, you got it right. This isn’t a mirror universe trick of interdimensional phenomenon designed to mind screw us into oblivion. Sgt. Friday says, Just the facts, Ma’am. This space base incident is sealed tightly with an airtight alibi.
Here’s the official police report: Creator Gene Roddenberry based his logical Vulcan, the legendary Mister Spock, on a police officer. And he wasn’t just any run of the mill cop. Roddenberry got inspired by the personality and philosophy of LAPD Chief of Police, the legendary William Parker.
Parker wasn’t only Roddenberry’s longtime friend, but also his boss, as Roddenberry had forged a career as a police officer himself.
Parker became such a colorful legend, and stood out as such an important part of the LAPD lore and history of the department, actor Nick Nolte played him in a movie released in 2013, Gangster Squad, also starring Sean Penn, Josh Brolin and Emma Stone.
What’s the one thing out of so many personality traits which spurred Roddenberry to use his old boss, Parker, as template for creating his Vulcan Science Officer serving on Captain James T Kirk’s Starship Enterprise? Was Parker highly analytical and logical like Spock? Did he have an extraordinary love for the discipline of science? Here’s what Roddenberry offered up as explanation during an interview he gave to the Los Angeles Times in 1984.
“Spock’s love of diversity came very much from my conversations with Bill and his love of diversity,” Roddenberry disclosed.
Roddenberry didn’t pull punches when reminiscing in other ways. He didn’t gloss things over nicely about the state of police affairs before Bill Parker’s tenure as Chief of Police. In the same LA Times interview from 1984, here’s what Trek’s main creator offers about how things were going at the time he served as a police officer himself.
“I quit my job with Pan Am and came out here from New York to see my dear and old friend who was then Inspector William Parker of the Wilshire Division,” Roddenberry said. “He wasn’t very enthusiastic about my plans. In fact, he did his best to talk me out of it … Bill was depressed about this career at that point,” Roddenberry continued. “It was not a nice, well-run police department in those days. He wasn’t the chief yet, and he felt he was at a dead end. He was considered an oddball at the time.”
Gene Roddenberry would ultimately quit the Los Angeles Police Department to pursue his Hollywood career in TV screenwriting, which had started flourishing. His creative talent was in demand by many hit TV shows. He simply couldn’t do both at the same time. If he hadn’t made that important decision to leave policing behind in 1956, it’s possible he’d never have created Star Trek, which premiered on NBC, 10 years later in 1966.
Now you know the true story of the essential police connection with Star Trek. So, whenever you watch a classic episode of Roddenberry’s Wagon Train To The Stars, or one of the beloved feature films, you can remember to tell your friends that Mister Spock isn’t all that exotic. He’s simply a modified alien law enforcement officer - walking a cosmic beat armed with, of course, his most logical nature.