Williams Opts Not to Meet NAACP Head : Dispute: The LAPD chief reportedly wanted a one-on-one session with the Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis and did not agree to include a delegation of gang and community leaders.

Police Chief Willie L. Williams has refused to meet with the newly selected head of the NAACP if the meeting includes a delegation of community leaders and gang members, activists in South-Central Los Angeles said Friday.

The Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis--who flew to Los Angeles on Monday night as his first official act as executive director of the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization--said he asked for the meeting to express concern over how police would be deployed in African-American communities after verdicts in the Rodney G. King civil rights trial.

But Williams, after learning that he would not be meeting with Chavis alone, refused to schedule the session, a high-ranking police official said.

“I came here to spend time in this community so I can feel the pulse of the community,” said Chavis, who has been living in public housing projects in South-Central Los Angeles since coming here. “You can’t separate me from the community. I’m a consensus builder.”

Some activists say that the fact that the meeting has not taken place flies in the face of Williams’ public support of community-based policing, which promotes citizen involvement in the department.

They speculated that Williams is afraid of antagonizing rank-and-file officers by meeting with gang members at a time when the department’s morale is all-important.

Jesse A. Brewer, police commission president, said Williams initially understood that the meeting would be one-on-one with Chavis. “Then at the last moment, he found out that it was going to be a group, and he felt that that would not be productive for the two of them to become acquainted,” Brewer said.

There have been discussions over the would-be meeting among National Assn. for Advancement of Colored People staff members, the Police Department and the Department of Justice community relations service, which has sent mediators to the city to urge calm after the verdicts.

On Thursday, Chavis said Williams, in a brief conversation, agreed to a meeting that would include the gang members. But he complained that the police chief never scheduled an appointment: “I really don’t think he wants to meet.”

Indeed, a police spokesman said Friday that Williams did not have a meeting listed on his calendar. “If he doesn’t have it on his calendar, then he’s not having a meeting,” the officer said. “That’s the way he is.”

A meeting with Chavis and the rest of the delegation would be symbolic in a community struggling to maintain a gang truce, said Fred Williams, a former gang member who now runs a program helping former gang members to lead productive lives.

“I’ve met with him,” Fred Williams said. “But he’s never met with the brothers who are struggling to maintain the peace.

“We’re not concerned about the trial. We are concerned about the deployment out here,” he said. “We are worried about how (the police) are going to respond when the verdict comes down. We are not animals or terrorists, so why treat us like this?”

Chavis said the meeting would send an important message to gang members who want to turn their lives around.

“In a city where there is an African-American police chief, when African-American brothers lay down their weapons, somebody needs to say that this a good thing,” Chavis said. “It doesn’t hurt for the police chief to do that.”

Earlier in the week, Chavis irritated the chief when he compared police preparations for potential unrest in Los Angeles to the mobilization surrounding Operation Desert Storm.

Chavis has said his stay in Los Angeles is part of an effort to expand and revitalize the NAACP. The 84-year-old organization has half a million members but has been criticized in recent years as irrelevant to the needs of inner-city blacks.

If he does have a meeting with the police chief, Chavis said, he wants to point out some of what he has seen “while living in the ‘hood.”

“The streets in the projects are very narrow, and one night I saw the police come racing through in a convoy,” he recalled. “Now, children play in the streets because there are not a lot of recreational activities.

“If some cops come through fast and they hit one of these children, the police are going to have a problem on their hands. The police need to relax and be cool,” Chavis said.