Williams Calls Koon Remarks ‘a Disgrace’ : LAPD: The chief-designate says racial references like those in the sergeant’s manuscript won’t be tolerated when he takes over.

Los Angeles Police Chief-designate Willie L. Williams said Wednesday that racial references in a manuscript written by a sergeant acquitted in the Rodney G. King beating were disgraceful and will not be tolerated in the department when he takes over next month.

Williams made the comments about a potential book penned by Sgt. Stacey C. Koon in which King is referred to as “Mandingo”--a reference to a West African people, used by some Westerners to denigrate black male slaves. Koon also wrote of the “high” he experienced after using force and described incidents in which he repeatedly shot a black man and viciously kicked a Latino drug suspect in the groin. Koon wrote that such language was gallows humor used by officers after dealing with stressful situations.

“If those statements are correct I think it’s a sad state of society,” Williams said of portions of the manuscript he had read. “I think it’s a disgrace that it came from a law enforcement officer in America.

“I will accept the fact that maybe part of what he says, hopefully not all of what he says, does exist in the Los Angeles Police Department. The real challenge to me is to root it out. It will not be acceptable under my watch in this police department. People that have that philosophy are not going to be welcome in the LAPD.”

Koon’s manuscript has been criticized, particularly by community and religious leaders in South Los Angeles, since excerpts were revealed. Williams made the statements on Koon’s book during the taping of “Press Conference,” a program that will be broadcast Sunday morning on KNBC, Channel 4.

In Los Angeles this week to look for a house before taking the chief’s job in late June, the former Philadelphia police commissioner spent much of Wednesday meeting with members of the community.

Among his stops was a visit with several hundred students, parents and teachers attending a human relations conference at the Los Angeles Police Academy. Williams received a warm reception and the students had many questions for him. He asked the students to help him spread racial harmony--and to help him keep youngsters away from gangs and drugs.

“Working with the youth of our community is the most important thing for the leaders of this city to do,” Williams said. “We need to provide an atmosphere in which they can grow in safety. We need to provide the appropriate atmosphere so you can live and learn without guns and drugs.

“This is not a (police) department, like some believe, that you need to run from. It’s your police department. Not just your father’s and mother’s--it’s your police department too.”

During the taping of the television program, Williams said much of the rioting that followed the not-guilty verdicts in the King beating case is rooted in the country’s culture of violence, which is “teaching and training and preparing a lot of our young people to become violent.”

“We have more guns available to the population than in any other country,” he said. “More people use them. Young people use them. We have violence on television. We have violence in the Saturday morning cartoons. You see violence in advertisements. . . . You put all of these things together and it really tears down the value system. . . . You put that together with critical incidents such as Rodney King and the Rodney Kings that have occurred in other cities and it’s not surprising that from time to time you are going to see these explosions of violence.”

Williams said he is a strong proponent of gun control.

“I think we really have to manage the manufacture, the sale and the use of handguns in America,” he said. “If you restrict the number of guns that are available to be purchased, (in the) long term you are going to begin to restrict the number of guns that are available” to criminals.