Tale of 2 Chiefs : Gates Takes Swipes as Williams Builds Bridges

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 usually meant white men in blue uniforms.

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

That moment, coming as Williams was embarking on his first full-fledged tour of Los Angeles last week, foreshadowed what would become increasing tensions between two by the end of the week.

Gates has been notably reluctant to leave, much less turn his office over to an outsider selected by the very Police Commission whose authority he challenges. Williams, who heads the Philadelphia Police Department, has said he is quitting his job May 16 to prepare himself to take over the beleaguered Los Angeles Police Department. Gates is not expected to retire until late June.

Though both men deny it, Los Angeles is in effect a city with two chiefs.

“This is very awkward,” Commissioner Ann Reiss Lane said. “Who’s in charge? . . . We began this process because Gates had said he was leaving in April. We didn’t create this problem, (but) it’s easily solvable. All he has to do is take his vacation pay and leave.”

But all Gates has said is that he plans to leave by July 1. And, in the meantime, commission members said they felt it was important for Williams to get to know the city and move ahead with the reforms that would restore faith in the scandal-plagued Police Department.

“I’m here,” the chief-designate said when he arrived last week on his first of several working trips, “to let Los Angeles meet Willie Williams.”

But the political footwork behind his trip was far more complicated than simply pounding the pavement. A lifelong Philadelphia resident, Williams did not know Los Angeles, let alone have a staff or power base here.

Wisely spurning an offer of an office in the Police Department’s headquarters because it could “send some of the wrong signals,” he nonetheless relied heavily on the police commissioners--the same five mayoral appointees who routinely tangle with Gates--to introduce him to community leaders.

On his trips, the signal he wanted to send was of a man eager to listen and learn and soak in the city’s diversity--a signal that set him apart from Gates, according to many who met him. Often, he was greeted with standing ovations.

Sorting through the more than 200 requests to meet him, Williams traveled from Chinatown to the Wilshire Division, from mothers of East Los Angeles to politically savvy members of the Westside-based Jewish Federation, visiting community groups that have largely supported reforms embraced by the commission and opposed by Gates.

Everywhere he went, he spoke of “bonding,” of uniting the “stakeholders”--all the people who make up a city. When he spoke of policing, he used the term “we.” Unwilling to make specific promises before he knew what lay ahead, he promised only to listen harder when he returned.

Squeezed in were meetings with members of the City Council: lunch with Michael Woo, a late afternoon session with Mike Hernandez, a Latino meeting organized by Richard Alatorre. 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, faces varied, but issues were the same: Crime. The fighting of it. The children feeling unsafe, the parents worried. 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 coming 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 to criticize the commission and the mayor, to defend Gates and encourage him to run for mayor.

“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’ve got a chief who’s a minority. And then we’ve got a mayor, I mean, what is going on here?”

Jackson asked the chief if he cared to respond to the “diatribe.”

“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 the newly named chief did not have a college degree, should have “stayed out” of the police reform issue on the ballot and was not 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. It was followed by a meeting with the Police Protective League, a meeting with Councilman Joel Wachs and a dinner in Koreatown.

On Saturday, Williams was still playing down the controversy.

“I just let the water roll off my back,” he said before starting a speech that yielded two standing ovations at the Black Women’s Forum. “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 after the Rodney G. King beating, Williams was also attempting to reach out to LAPD officers. Many were suspicious because he met with community groups that are critical of the department and he endorsed 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 agree that Williams was well on his way last week to consolidating his political constituency.

Byran Jackson, a Cal State Los Angeles political professor who writes about 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 by 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,” Steinberg said.

Still, Jan H. Subar of Granada Hills, an area chairman in the Devonshire Division Neighborhood Watch, a group of primarily white homeowners that constitutes the city’s largest such group, said she was not bothered that her group will not 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.”

Times staff writer Ron Russell contributed to this story.