Dodging Trouble : Williams Takes Stand but Avoids Gates’ Toes

For a few minutes this week, the old and new chiefs of the Los Angeles Police Department sat on the same side of the table at a tense budget hearing at City Hall.

Instinctively, each man leaned away from the other.

On the right was Chief Daryl F. Gates, 65, a man of intense blue eyes and sharp tongue, a veteran insider who rose through the ranks as the chief’s driver in the 1950s when LAPD meant white men in blue uniforms.

To his left was Willie L. Williams, 48. Oversized, outgoing, out-of-state and black, he seemed the opposite of Gates. An outsider.

Under unsparing spotlights this week, Williams came to Los Angeles to try, in his words, to “let Los Angeles meet Willie Williams.”

But the political footwork behind his trip was far more complicated than simply pounding the pavement. Somehow, Williams had to establish a power base without stepping on the toes of Gates, a sophisticated infighter who has been reluctant to leave the department he has headed for 14 years.

Enter the Los Angeles Police Commission, an ethnically diverse five-member panel that has regularly tangled with Gates over reform. The commissioners, who had selected Philadelphia’s police chief over five of Gates’ finest, stepped in to help chart Williams’ first full-blown trip to Los Angeles.

Although well aware that Williams could become a prime target of Gates before he steps down in June, sources close to the commission said they felt it was nonetheless important to show that the reform of the Police Department has begun in an effort to restore public faith in the scandal-plagued department. The commissioners figured that if Gates acted up, he would be written off as the vestige of the old guard.

“Of course, we’re trying to acquaint him with what’s going on here,” said Police Commissioner Jesse A. Brewer, a former assistant police chief. “But we don’t have to give him a lot of advice. He knows exactly what he wants to say.”

Smartly, Williams turned down an offer of office space at Gates’ Parker Center, explaining that “setting up shop in the building before it’s your turn can send some of the wrong signals unintentionally.”

Then, he set out to meet community groups.

From Chinatown to the Wilshire Division, from mothers in East L.A. to politically savvy members of the Jewish Federation, the Philadelphia native spoke not of criminals and victims, nor even homeowners and businessmen, but of “stakeholders”: all the people who make up a city. When asked specific questions about LAPD, he often said, simply, “I don’t know the answer to that yet.”

Squeezed in were meetings with members of the City Council. Lunch with Michael Woo, a late afternoon session with Mike Hernandez, a Latino community meeting headed by Richard Alatorre. Councilman Ernani Bernardi, one of the few council members he had not yet met, accosted him on his way out of the budget hearing.

Everywhere he went, even as the faces varied, the issues were the same: Crime. The fighting of it. The children feeling unsafe and the parents concerned. The shopkeepers in Chinatown who shutter their stores before dark, just like the shopkeepers in Wilshire Division.

“I’m the chief of police for all groups, not just one,” he told the ethnically diverse Wilshire Division, where graffiti cover a sign in the police parking lot.

His biggest faux pas was pronouncing the upcoming Mexican holiday, “Cinco de Mayo,” as if it were a salad dressing. Quickly, he added that he and his wife plan to take up conversational Spanish.

Things seemed to be going well--until Friday morning, when Gates began taking swipes at his successor on Michael Jackson’s KABC radio talk show.

One listener, named Michael, called in to praise Gates at length, then ended with: “And let me say one more thing. I’m really concerned about the fact that all this leadership is all falling in the hands of minorities. I mean, we have a City Council that’s all minorities. Now we have a chief that’s a minority. And the mayor . . . what’s going on here?”

“Well, I’d just say, thank you, Michael,” Gates told him.

An hour later, while Williams was meeting with members of the LAPD Command Officers Assn. Gates said Williams did not have a college degree, should have “stayed out” of the police reform issue on the ballot, and wasn’t nearly as tough an internal “disciplinarian” as Gates was.

“I’m feeling right at home now,” Williams quipped when reporters asked him for a response to Gates’ comments as he rushed out of a meeting in Chinatown, followed by a meeting with the Police Protective League, a meeting with City Councilman Joel Wachs and a dinner in Koreatown.

On Saturday morning, despite the presence of TV cameras at every stop, Williams was still playing down the controversy.

“I try not to deal with those things,” he said Saturday, before starting a speech that yielded two standing ovations at the Black Women’s Forum. “I just let the water roll off my back. . . . I’ve been attacked far more personally than that over the last four years.”

Facing enormous transition problems even as the budget was being cut back and morale was low in wake of the Rodney G. King beating, Williams was also attempting to reach out LAPD officers. Many were suspicious of his meeting with community groups that are critical of the department and endorsement of a police reform measure strongly opposed by the officers’ union.

“We have to raise the morale of the officers,” Williams told one community group. “I’ve got to be their umbrella. . . . (But) I have to make sure that the community understands how difficult it is to be a police officer, how lonely it is at times, and how life-threatening it is.”

Political consultants who make a living judging image-making generally agreed that Williams walked his narrow line well.

Byran Jackson, a Cal State Los Angeles political professor who writes books on Los Angeles politics, said Williams was wise to reach out first to what Jackson called his “natural base”--the groups most affected by brutality and racism controversies.

“He is saying, ‘Give me something to stand on, I’m brand new to this city and I don’t know anybody,’ ” Jackson said. “By reaching out to groups not included in the past, he’s coating himself with Teflon. His officers can (continue to) enforce the law . . . but he will not be viewed as anyone who is promoting mistreatment of the public.”

Arnold Steinberg, who advises conservative candidates locally, said that although Williams presented himself well, most of his meetings were with groups viewed as being politically correct by City Hall’s liberal, Democratic Establishment and officials such as Mayor Tom Bradley and Police Commission President Stanley K. Sheinbaum.

“I think some meetings with Chamber (of Commerce) groups, homeowners would have been good,” he added.

Still, Jan H. Subar of Granada Hills, an area chairman in the Devonshire Division Neighborhood Watch, a group of primarily white homeowners that constitute the city’s largest such group, said she was not bothered that her group won’t meet with Williams until another trip.

“I myself was a little disappointed that they didn’t pick someone from within the department (as chief),” she said. “But my impression of Willie Williams is good. . . . Daryl Gates has been around this city more than 40 years, when this town was a lot smaller and more homogeneous. Anyone coming in now will have a far more diverse following, and I don’t think anyone needs to be threatened by that.”