Gates Refuses to Halt Promotions : LAPD: Defiant chief will not obey Police Commission order on high-level reassignments. He unleashes first public criticism of Williams.

Bitterly defiant and fighting to the end, Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates told the Police Commission on Friday he will refuse to comply with its order to halt and rescind a series of high-level command reassignments so that incoming chief Willie L. Williams can have more leeway in building his management team.

“You have a man with a great pride,” Commission President Stanley Sheinbaum said of Gates, “and he’s finding it very hard to give up the reins.”

Before the chief’s blowup with the commission--and after carefully watching his words for days--Gates also took his first swipes at his successor. During an impromptu news conference in a hallway at Parker Center, Gates said the chief-designate should have “stayed out” of a ballot issue over police reform and should have had a four-year college degree, which Williams does not.

“This is a very prestigious organization and the position is a very prestigious position,” Gates said. “Like many other prestigious positions, I think it requires some time in academia.”

The Los Angeles Police Department has stressed the value of education, he said, and most of Williams’ competitors for the job from inside the organization are “highly educated people.” Naming a chief with a two-year degree sends a “message” contrary to that tradition, he said.

The incoming chief, Gates said, also should “think a little more” before talking about moving officers out of “soft” desk jobs. “I think he was led down the primrose path by some (City) Council people who have made those kinds of statements,” Gates said.

All in all, Gates made it clear Friday that, after 14 years as chief, he has no intention of going quietly as Williams takes the helm of a department rocked by allegations of brutality and racism.

As he said of the Police Commission’s action: “I’m very good at keeping a controversy alive; very good at it.”

Williams refused to jump into the fray as he went about his crowded schedule of meeting with community leaders, police officials and politicians. By late afternoon, after a meeting with the Police Protective League, one reporter asked if he feared that Gates’ remarks might prove damaging if he did not respond.

“Being chief of police, you’re going to take lumps,” he said. “If lumps get passed out, it doesn’t do you any good to get in a combative mode unless it’s really necessary. This is not something I need to get into a combative mode over.”

The latest clash between Gates and the mayoral-appointed commission erupted at a special meeting where the panel ordered the chief to refrain from making any reassignments of LAPD commanders without commission approval. The three commissioners present also voted unanimously to instruct Gates to rescind all such transfers made in the past month.

The commissioners said the action was necessary to give Williams flexibility in building his management team. Gates has made several reassignments recently--including signing orders Thursday to fill commanding officer slots at police divisions in West Los Angeles, Southeast, North Hollywood and the elite Metro Division.

He had refused to comply with a request by Sheinbaum to hold off on such reassignments, prompting Friday’s special session.

Because of a city hiring freeze, Gates’ reassignments do not include promotions to higher ranks or pay increases. But they move lower ranked officers in positions of greater responsibility, perhaps giving them a leg up on the promotions when the freeze is lifted.

Legally, Williams can undo the reassignments--as Gates argued during the commission’s meeting. But commissioners say the transfers nonetheless will hinder Williams.

“It certainly makes it more difficult (to make command changes),” said Commissioner Ann Reiss Lane. “It’s hard on these people if they have an assumption the job is theirs. And it will build more ill will, again, for a new chief.”

Lane expressed exasperation at Gates’ defiance and theorized that it is linked to the chief’s book, which will hit bookstores in about three weeks. “The more press he gets the better it is,” she said.

Gates said through a spokesman that his stand has nothing to do with the book and he has “enough publicity and controversy to last four books.”

Sheinbaum said the panel has not decided on its next step.

“Obviously, this is a decision we don’t make in hurry. We’ll have to consider that,” he said, adding that he doubts that the panel will seek to fire the chief or go to court.

Lane and other commissioners said some of the positions had not been filled for months and it seemed unnecessary to act now.

But at Friday’s session, Gates angrily insisted that he was acting within his legal authority under the City Charter and that he had an obligation as the city’s top police official to ensure that all crucial field command positions are filled.

He called the commission’s action “absolutely unconscionable,” adding later: “I will tell you this. You cannot stop me form doing this.

“I will do what I think is necessary. . . . You just take whatever action you want.”

Gates accused the Police Commission of improperly meddling in the department, and repeatedly demanded to know the “genesis” of the effort to block his reassignments. He suggested during the meeting and afterward that his longtime archrival, Mayor Tom Bradley, was behind the effort. He told reporters later that the “politicization of the department (was) beginning.”

Bradley’s spokesman, Bill Chandler, acknowledged that the mayor’s office wrote the commission early this month urging that reassignments by Gates be halted, after the mayor’s office received complaints from high-ranking LAPD officers, whom he declined to name.

But Chandler and Sheinbaum insisted that the commission’s action was based on its own concerns.

“It doesn’t take a management expert to recognize how deathbed appointments by an outgoing executive are detrimental to an organization,” Chandler said. “The Police Commission has taken a reasonable approach to monitoring the appointment of police officials.”