NEWS ANALYSIS : Job Will Be an Uphill Fight for Williams

For the last three months, Willie L. Williams has weathered what would seem to be the toughest scrutiny imaginable. He has withstood private interviews, survived a deep background check and prevailed over some of the Los Angeles Police Department’s finest and most respected administrators.

But when the man who revamped Philadelphia’s troubled Police Department comes to Los Angeles to take charge of the LAPD, he may very well learn that the real battle has just begun. As the city’s new police chief, Williams will face many obstacles.

He must turn around a department that has been racked by charges of racism and brutality and mismanagement in the wake of the Rodney G. King beating, while at the same time he must embrace a community whose trust of the Police Department has soured in the last year.

Coupled with that, Williams--who becomes the first minority chief and the first outsider to head the department in more than four decades--must adapt quickly to a complex, multicultural city that could take years to fully understand. It seemed clear Wednesday that even in the city’s African-American community, Williams will not be automatically supported simply because he is black.

Inside the Police Department, he will have to grapple with veteran officers who for generations have believed that the LAPD can do no wrong and needs no reform.

Moreover, police morale is at an all-time low, and Williams’ selection in itself sends a message to many rank-and-file officers and managers that good work does not necessarily mean a chance at the top job. To further complicate matters for him, Los Angeles’ Civil Service restrictions will prevent Williams from bringing in his own people, as he did in Philadelphia. Instead, he will be forced to choose his top brass from among the LAPD’s highly politicized ranks.

On top of all this, Williams comes to the LAPD at a time when the city is facing deep budget cuts that might affect his ability to bring about change.

“Some people may expect him to be a miracle man, coming in and literally overnight turning around this department,” said John Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League. “It is probably going to take him longer than some people would like to see before he begins to make a real impact. . . . He is not Superman. He is not God.”

Bill Rathburn was once in Williams’ shoes. Rathburn is a former deputy chief of the LAPD who became chief of the Dallas police force at time when racial tensions were running high. Rathburn said Williams’ most urgent task will be to restore pride within the department.

“The Los Angeles Police Department is horribly demoralized,” he said. “They have been beaten up so many times in so many ways over the last 13 months, and I think that it’s really a tragedy in Los Angeles.

“The line officers feel they have no support, not even from their own superiors. So as a result of that they have withdrawn. And that will be No. 1 for Willie Williams. That will be his primary challenge. He’s got to get the officers back to work.”

Rathburn, however, had an advantage that Williams will not. He was able to appoint his own top staff. “I had flexibility in assignments and reassignments,” Rathburn said. “Basically, he’s stuck with who’s there.”

Inside Parker Center and at outlying stations Wednesday, police officers and supervisors were fast to tick off the many obstacles that stand in Williams’ way if he is to effectively rebuild the Los Angeles Police Department as its first new chief in 14 years.

Some were blunt, such as Lt. Ron Hall of the West Los Angeles Division, who said he is “not happy” that an outsider has been chosen to lead the 8,300-member department.

Referring to the five inside finalists who lost out to Williams, Hall said: “They have ties. They know the needs of the community. They understand the process. Mr. Williams does not. . . . He’ll be a general manager with no real knowledge of his company.”

But others, like Sgt. Harry Ryon, a 20-year veteran who defends officers accused of misconduct, said they welcome the new chief as long as he understands that the toughest problem facing the LAPD is to silence the community critics who have harshly blasted the department since the March 3, 1991, beating of King.

“The first thing he needs to do is to address all these mad dogs sitting out there drooling and waiting to tear this department to pieces,” Ryon said. “He needs to fend them off. He needs to get on with business and maintain a clean, corrupt-free department.”

That task will not be easy.

Eric Rose, a political consultant over the years for Chief Daryl F. Gates and former Chief Edward M. Davis, noted that the mere fact that Williams comes from outside Los Angeles automatically will dampen already sagging morale among rank-and-file officers.

“It takes away the dream that every police officer has who has gone through the academy recruitment class,” Rose said. “He is told from the start that if you want to be and aspire to be and try your hardest to be, then one day you will be the chief of police of this city.”

Some officers, speaking privately, said the fact that Williams is black could further inflame animosities in the Police Department among those who believe that Anglo officers are being held back by court decrees setting minority hiring levels.

“They picked him because he is an outsider and because he is black,” said one sergeant who recently retired and asked not to be identified. “The trend over there is going to be going over to the extremely liberal side rather than the conservative.

“Affirmative action will be No. 1. And there will be a lot of people upset about that.”

At the same time, he said, officers may resist a shift in emphasis from the LAPD’s historical mandate to “arrest people and solve crime” to the new trend toward community-oriented policing. “People will not want to be making that shift,” the ex-sergeant said.

Beyond reshaping the LAPD, if Williams is to succeed in Los Angeles he must reach out to the city’s diverse minority communities, many of which are disaffected after years of strained relations with the LAPD. A key test of his leadership will be whether he can make the citizens of Los Angeles once again feel good about their Police Department--and whether he can do it quickly enough.

That he is black will probably help him in at least some quarters, particularly South-Central Los Angeles, where Mack predicted there would be “great joy” over Williams’ selection.

But it may also be a drawback. Some Latino leaders remain angry that their favored candidate--Lee Baca, the deputy chief of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department--was eliminated from consideration. On Wednesday, the chairman of NEWS for America, a group of Chicano professionals who threw a kink into the selection process by raising allegations of misconduct against three candidates, boldly predicted that Williams will be a failure.

“Willie will not last,” Xavier Hermosillo said. “He doesn’t know San Pedro from Sherman Oaks.”

Meanwhile, Antonia Hernandez, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and a member of the Citizen Selection Panel for LAPD Chief, called upon Williams to “heal the wounds” of the selection process by making a Latino a member of his top brass.

While black community leaders declared William’s selection a cause for celebration, they too were cautious. Bitter feelings between the LAPD and the residents of the city’s poorest neighborhoods run deep, and those sentiments are not likely to be erased simply by the appointment of a black man to the top job.

“The community is not going to give him a blank check,” said Danny Bakewell, president of the Brotherhood Crusade. “I think there is going to be an outpouring of support, and I certainly plan on giving him that. But there are many who are going to be saying we are not going to be faked out by the appointment of a black police chief. . . . People are going to reserve judgment on him until they see how he handles a very critical situation.”

Mack, the president of the Urban League, said Williams may face obstacles precisely because he is black.

“It constitutes a double whammy,” Mack said. “On the one hand there will be great expectations, and maybe some unreasonable expectations, of him from some within the African-American community, expecting him to come in overnight and totally turn around an entrenched institution. . . .

“On the other hand,” Mack added, “there will be the tendency on the part of the white community to erroneously assume that he is going to favor blacks over everybody else because he is black. That is an unfair burden that has historically been imposed on African-Americans in key leadership positions.”

For his part, Williams has said he is aware of the challenge. “I saw the job as police chief in Los Angeles as another challenge, not just a day-to-day challenge, a major challenge to try to undertake some of the clear changes that were called for through the Christopher Commission,” he said in a recent interview. “I felt I had some background and ability to do that.”