Williams Lauded at Meeting of Black Police Executives : Law enforcement: New L.A. chief, the group’s outgoing president, is praised for enhancing the advancement of African-American officers and for being a role model to today’s youths.

In this city of trumpets and tributes, Willie L. Williams took center stage Monday and stole the show.

As usual, the reserved Williams was wearing a dark business suit and red tie. But he was dancing something that resembled the mambo while leading a collection of jazz musicians and Mardi Gras dancers through a hotel ballroom within earshot of the famed French Quarter.

High-stepping behind him to the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” were nearly a thousand of the country’s top African-American police officers, who have gathered in New Orleans for the largest conference of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives ever held.

The impromptu parade through the Fairmont Hotel was a joyful and gratifying moment for Los Angeles’ new police chief, NOBLE’s outgoing president, who always wears the organization’s pin on his lapel.

It also revealed the high respect the group’s members have for the accomplishments of a man who was tapped for one of the most prestigious municipal law enforcement jobs in the nation.

To Johnnie Johnson--who in 1966 became only the second African-American officer in the history of the Birmingham, Ala., police force--Williams is proof that inner-city black children trapped in a world of crime and poverty can improve themselves and better their communities.

“He gives all these youths hope for their own futures,” said Johnson, who is now police chief in Birmingham. “He is a leader and a symbol and a man who remembers from whence he came.”

Silas M. Geralds, who commands patrol officers for the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Department upriver from here, said that he hopes to be like Williams in style and position.

“When I get back home,” Geralds said, “I’m going to tell my officers that the most important thing for uniformed patrol guys to do is to start making more contacts with the citizens.

“They can’t just ride around in patrol cars all day and make arrests. They’ve got to get out of those cars and talk to the citizens and get into community-based policing. And community-based policing is the bible for Chief Willie Williams.”

With nearly 3,000 members, NOBLE is made up of police officials in the public and private sector who are at the equivalent rank of lieutenant or above. Besides Williams in Los Angeles, there are black police chiefs in such large cities as New York, Detroit, Washington, Atlanta and New Orleans.

Each year the group convenes to share ideas on how best to promote issues of keen importance to the African-American police officer.

In speeches and interviews here Monday, Williams was cited for continuing to develop the organization’s mentor program, which teaches young black police officers how to move up the ranks. He also was commended for his tenure as NOBLE president and for his efforts to win directorships for blacks over federal law enforcement agencies.

But as Williams was being roundly feted, it was clear that his successes--or failures--in Los Angeles will be closely monitored, especially among young blacks in law enforcement who see him as a role model who can rid their profession of the evils of a scandal, such as the one surrounding the beating of Rodney G. King.

“I understand and I recognize that everything I do will be watched,” Williams said. “My successes will be seen as steppingstones for others, and my failures as setbacks.”

But his supporters are betting that any setbacks, if any, will be few.

“He’s going to succeed even if we have to pull forth all of our resources to help him,” said Cambridge, Mass., Police Chief Perry Anderson, who headed up the Miami Police Department and at the close of convention business this week will succeed Williams as NOBLE’s president.

Equally optimistic was LAPD Deputy Chief Bernard C. Parks, who until Williams came aboard was the department’s highest-ranking African-American officer.

Parks joined NOBLE in its infancy 16 years ago, when he was a police lieutenant. Leaving the convention floor for a break in a session Monday morning, he credited the organization and its leaders for boosting the careers of African-Americans in law enforcement.

“This makes for a very positive difference,” he said of NOBLE and committed people such as Williams. “And that is what it’s all about.”

Williams joined NOBLE in the late 1970s as a police lieutenant in Philadelphia. Before that, there was Frank Walker, a black captain in Philadelphia, where Williams got his start and where, in the 1960s, opportunities were limited for black police officers.

Williams recalled how Walker took a small group of young black officers and taught them how to pass written and oral promotion examinations. He remembered how Walker told them that they did not have to be consigned to patrol duty, but rather that they could rise high in the police ranks.

“He said: ‘You can drive around in a blue car for the next 20 years, or you can study and prepare yourself and supervise and manage people as a police administrator,’ ” Williams said.

“Frank had us over to his house. We sat in his kitchen, or the back porch, or the living room. And out of that group, I eventually became police commissioner of Philadelphia.”

Also in that group was Richard Neal, now chief inspector for the Philadelphia Police Department and one of five finalists to succeed Williams as police commissioner there.

Neal, standing in the rear of the ballroom as Williams opened the weeklong conference, expressed no reservations that Williams will restore police accountability in Los Angeles, just as he helped pull the Philadelphia Police Department out of the ashes of the controversial 1985 bombing of the MOVE cult headquarters in that Philadelphia.

“Not only is he the right man for the job in L.A., but he is also the best man,” Neal said. “There is no doubt about that in my mind.”