Williams’ Task Is Familiar but the Challenge Is Bigger : LAPD: New chief has dealt before with a tarnished police image. But will Philadelphia formula work here?

In this city, where cops once were known as “Rizzo’s Raiders” and a disastrous police bombing brought shame and divisiveness, Willie L. Williams got his first shot at trying to mend a law enforcement agency’s tattered relationship with its community.

Today in Los Angeles, where Williams ceremoniously takes the oath of office as the city’s 50th police chief, he gets an even bigger challenge: seeing if his Philadelphia formula can work here.

Police officers, politicians, academics and community activists--who for the most part give high marks to the legacy Williams left behind--disagree on how much personal credit he deserves for the Philadelphia reforms. But it is clear that Williams will be on familiar ground as he embarks on his new job:

* Just as the LAPD under Daryl F. Gates was accused of brutality, racism and mismanagement, the Philadelphia force Williams inherited was known for a tough-cop stance fostered by Police Commissioner Frank Rizzo.

* Los Angeles’ Rodney G. King beating scandal created a public relations catastrophe similar to that which followed the Philadelphia Police Department’s decision to bomb the hide-out of the MOVE revolutionary cult. Eleven people were killed and five dozen homes damaged in the 1985 bombing.

* A special citizens committee was created to probe the failings of the Rizzo regime and the MOVE bombing and to make recommendations on pulling the police force out of the ruins--as the Christopher Commission did in Los Angeles after the King beating.

* And Philadelphia solved at least some of its problems by embarking upon community-based policing, turning much of the work of law enforcement into a partnership with the public in a program that Williams is expected to expand in Los Angeles.

“The comparisons are striking,” said Jack Greene, director of the Center for Public Policy at Temple University here, who has worked with the police rebuilding effort and is writing a book, “From the Ashes: The Reform of the Philadelphia Police Department.”

To Los Angeles as it prepares to rebuild its Police Department under Williams, he said: “I wish you luck there.”

In Washington, Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, a public, nonprofit research organization, agreed that “there are a lot of corollaries” between Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

“Philadelphia used to be looked at as a Police Department out of control,” he said. “It was sometimes seen as insulting to the minority community. Excessive use of force was fairly common. And corruption was a problem.

“But today I think the Philadelphia Police Department has taken strong measures to eliminate the use-of-force problems. The corruption stigma is not as significant. And police seem to have regained the respect of the community.”

Many say the changes never could have happened under the regime of Rizzo, just as Gates was seen as an impediment to the reforms demanded after the King beating.

Rizzo--police commissioner and later mayor through the 1960s and 1970s--died last year in the midst of a reelection bid in which he criticized Williams’ management style and pledged to fire him.

When the funeral procession marched solemnly up Broad Street last year, carrying Rizzo’s body into the heart of Philadelphia and past the 35th District police station, Sgt. Ronald Munday was among the hundreds lining the sidewalk to glimpse the passing cortege.

At that moment, Munday, a black cop with 23 years on the job, said he could not help thinking about what the department had been--and what it had become.

“They used to call us Rizzo’s Raiders. And that MOVE debacle didn’t help us any either,” Munday said. “Those were some of the darkest days of our history. We had some bad policies back then, and the community lost faith in us.”

Williams, one of a string of commissioners who came after Rizzo, was appointed in 1988. He was the first black to head the Police Department, a distinction he holds in Los Angeles history as well.

His immediate predecessor in the Philadelphia job was Kevin Tucker, a former U.S. Treasury Department official who during his two-year tenure cast himself as a reformer determined to rebuild the Police Department.

Williams took over where Tucker left off, carrying on the reforms that his predecessor won with the help of the business and civic communities. Community-based policing became his hallmark.

“Tucker took the bull by the horns, but Williams kept up the momentum,” said City Councilman Herbert H. DeBeary Sr., head of the council’s Public Safety Committee.

But the councilman said Williams has a daunting job ahead of him in Los Angeles. A black man, DeBeary visited Los Angeles seven years ago. He was waiting outside his brother’s apartment one day when suddenly, he said, a phalanx of white LAPD officers surrounded him, guns pointed and cocked, mistaking him for a criminal suspect.

“That damn Police Department is absolutely insane,” he said. “But,” he added quickly, “we’ve been there too.”

His colleague and former head of the public safety panel, Councilwoman Joan L. Krajewski, said Williams does not deserve sole credit for turning the department around. She points to a community effort.

“This is a good town; this is a good city,” she said. “Life is the best here in Philadelphia, but I’m not ready to say Commissioner Williams made everybody love everybody.”

Bill Smith and Ian H. Lennox, who run the Citizens Crime Commission of Delaware Valley, also credited the community with much of the improvement in police relations. A score of police mini-stations went up, and many officers consider a posting there to be a plum assignment. Even when one mini-station was bombed, officers still volunteered for the community service jobs.

“Most of the cops on the street today never personally knew Frank Rizzo,” Lennox said. “They’ve heard of him, that’s all. But they can tell you all about Commissioner Williams and generally, they were happy with him. He was fair. And the Police Department wasn’t getting trashed in the newspaper every day.”

Just as Philadelphians offer mixed reviews of Williams’ performance, statistics from his tenure provide conflicting evidence.

In Williams’ first full two years as commissioner, the city experienced new high records in violent crime. But last year, after police and federal agents cracked down on violent narcotics traffickers, drug-related homicides dropped. In fact, Philadelphia became the only city among the nation’s 10 largest to post a significant decrease in homicides last year.

Since 1988, the year Williams took the oath as the top cop in Philadelphia, the number of racial minorities on the force has increased 34%, and the number of female officers 33%, according to statistics provided by officials at police headquarters, known as the Roundhouse.

In addition, police appeared to accept citizen complaints more readily, sustaining a steadily increasing number of such complaints during the Williams years. And even though Williams resisted calls to appoint citizens to participate in the police disciplinary process, he fired more than 50 officers for misconduct.

Still, troublesome vestiges of corruption and brutality remain.

A federal probe into a stolen-car ring at the city tow lot--in which a dozen officers and two commanders were targeted--surfaced shortly after Williams left office.

There were also cries of police brutality after a demonstration by members of ACT UP, a gay rights organization protesting a visit by President Bush last September. A dozen protesters and four officers were injured in the rally-turned-melee.

“I saw a number of objects being thrown at police officers,” said James Clark, who served as Williams’ first deputy commissioner and is chief of police in Chester, Pa. “I saw police officers being spat upon. As a matter of fact, I was covered in spit.”

But Norman Baker, an ACT UP spokesman, remembers it differently. “Scores and scores of police came across the lines, wielding sticks, and with the horse patrol pushing the people back, the police officers beat people up. Savagely. They were hurting people like in a frenzy. It was just wild, like mayhem.”

Williams invited an independent panel to determine what went wrong. But when the group released its findings recently, Williams made it clear that he had no intention of accepting its key recommendation--the creation of a permanent citizens’ review board to probe police misconduct.

In addition, Williams leaves behind a Police Department struggling to cope with outdated equipment and facilities. Patrol cars are not outfitted with computers. Station house roofs leak. One station was found to have lead in its drinking water.

And officer morale has been a problem, particularly when Williams was sued by the police union in a bitter fight over his attempt to promote 14 “favorites” into the high ranks, or when he moved two dozen top commanders back into uniform patrol to fill in during vacations.

“Frank Rizzo got a rap because he was Frank Rizzo,” said John Shaw, who heads the Fraternal Order of Police union. “He was a cops’ cop and he took no crap. So it’s tough for me to even grade the guy (Williams). He and I are like oil and water.”

Still, perhaps one of the most telling examples of the Williams legacy came this month, when a white officer responding to a domestic disturbance was shot and critically wounded just below his bulletproof vest. His assailant, a black man, was chased by police, and shot and killed. The gunfire erupted on a humid Sunday afternoon in a high-crime, minority neighborhood.

Had the same incident occurred in Los Angeles, it could have set off another furor such as that after the not guilty verdicts in the King beating. In Philadelphia, however, people remained calm. Credit went to civil affairs officers who responded to the neighborhood, knocking on doors to explain the shootings. It was perhaps community-based policing in its rawest form.

As a newcomer to Los Angeles, Williams faces a tougher task than he did in Philadelphia, where he spent his entire career. He has no experience dealing with Los Angeles’ political structure and lacks an insider’s historical perspective on the highly insular Los Angeles Police Department.

In practical terms, he inherits a department with the lowest officer to citizen ratio in any major U.S. city, where crime is continuing to increase, and where physical and emotional remnants of the riots threaten to dominate the landscape for years to come.

Still, Hubert Williams, head of the Police Foundation, said Los Angeles can also reach a level of trust, even though it may seem that police and community relations are at the crisis stage. Quoting Confucius, he said: “The definition of crisis is opportunity.”

Meanwhile, as far as police work is concerned, there have been many opportunities for improvement in Philadelphia.

In the Norris Square area--home to African-Americans, Puerto Ricans and Palestinians--a neighborhood park was once overrun by drug dealers and prostitutes. Today, the park boasts a children’s playground, and new maple and sweet gum trees.

“In the past,” said Sister Carol Keck, a community activist, “the youths used to set the trees on fire just to watch the Fire Department come and put them out.”

A row house near her Norris Square Neighborhood Project office was once a crack house, but it has been cleaned out and a young family has moved in. And where once parents used to stay inside and peer out windows at drug dealers, they walk boldly along their sidewalks, often to neighborhood meetings.

The police are always invited, and the police always come.

They pass out crime tip sheets. They trade information on suspicious license plates. They plan cleanup patrols where teen-agers and adults spend weekend afternoons ridding the neighborhood of discarded needles, condoms and beer bottles.

“All the conditions that occurred with the L.A. riots were once present right here,” Keck said. “But the reason this neighborhood didn’t blow up is because of our partnership with the police.”

Across Broad Street from Norris Square, Portia Reason sits in her hot brick row house in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood and voices similar thoughts. She can recall a time when white cops routinely lined black youths up against ghetto walls, and when the air was filled with a public distrust of the Philadelphia Police Department.

But today she chairs a community-police advisory board. She walks a citizen patrol at night. She helps officers on the beat ferret out drug dealers. Her grandfather may have feared the police and her grandson today sits in prison, but this 59-year-old black woman has photographs hanging in her dining room in which she is smiling and hugging police officers.

She tries to explain the drastic change in the atmosphere. “Until you get involved yourself with the police officers,” she said, “you will never understand.”

The rapport with police has provided a framework for resolution of other kinds of disputes. Reason’s neighborhood is becoming home to a growing number of Korean-Americans. Many older black residents are resisting the culture mix and complain about the number of liquor licenses the new immigrants have obtained for their groceries.

To ease hard feelings, some Korean-Americans have escorted black youths to Phillies games. Reason’s police advisory board has invited the Korean-Americans to holiday dinners. They also air their differences at community meetings attended by police officers.

One recent topic was how to reclaim a single street corner where drug dealers had brazenly set up furniture to sell their wares. Reason and others spent hours documenting the activity there, and then police, armed with this information, swept through, seizing the dealers’ chairs and boxes, and making a number of arrests.

It was a small victory. The dealers moved to another corner. “But it was a start,” Reason said, and then pointed from her porch to another corner and her group’s next order of business.