Simi’s Top Police Chief Candidate Draws Praise : Law enforcement: Willard Schlieter is known as a consensus-builder in Illinois town. He says move would be a step up.

The top candidate for Simi Valley police chief is known as a consensus-builder who has made striking changes in his three years as police chief in the small college town of Urbana, Ill., officials there said Friday.

Urbana Chief Willard Schlieter, 53, acknowledged Friday he is among Simi Valley’s top four candidates, but would not confirm that he is the first choice to replace outgoing Chief Lindsey Paul Miller.

Simi Valley officials have said they are doing an extensive background check on the best candidate for the slot, but have steadfastly refused to confirm reports from sources that Schlieter is their top choice.

Schlieter said that commanding the Simi Valley department’s staff of 156, including 109 sworn officers, would be a step up from his current post.

“It’s a nice-sized city, a nice-sized department,” he said of Simi Valley. “The city itself seems to be financially, economically sound. It seems like a really good opportunity to do some good work.”

As for Simi Valley’s ranking among the top four safest cities in the United States with populations over 100,000, he said, “It’s certainly attractive.”

By contrast, Urbana, Ill., is a small city of 36,383 with a smaller police department--45 sworn officers and 18 civilians.

Urbana and neighboring Champaign make up a metropolitan hub of about 101,000 people halfway between St. Louis and Chicago, which is 130 miles away.

The Champaign-Urbana area encircles the University of Illinois campus, and the Urbana City Council has a reputation statewide for liberal politics, said Sgt. Mike Miller, head of the Urbana police union.

“We have a lot of youth-oriented problems because of the influx we’ve had of crack cocaine,” said Miller, president of the local Fraternal Order of Police. “It’s had a pretty bad economic impact on young people. We started seeing crack in here within the last two years.”

Like police chiefs in many other cities, Schlieter had to cope with a rise in violent crime in the early 1990s.

In 1991, the year Schlieter was appointed, Urbana had no murders, 49 robberies, 111 assaults, 528 burglaries, 1,300 thefts, 50 car thefts and 14 cases of arson, according to statistics kept by FBI.

In 1992, the most recent available FBI statistics show, the city had two murders, 68 robberies, 130 assaults, 435 burglaries, 1,212 thefts, 50 motor vehicle thefts and eight cases of arson.

In some of the Urbana’s poorer neighborhoods, residents complain that police patrols have grown scarcer in recent years, said Jettie Rhodes, a member of Concerned Citizens for Better Neighborhoods.

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Rhodes said Schlieter and other police and city officials have been working closely with her community improvement group to push back the rise of drug traffic and related crimes, but more should be done.

“The police were doing a better job at patrolling the area before he came,” Rhodes said in a telephone interview Friday. “Since he’s come here, there’s been quite a few complaints about patrolling the area as well as they should.”

After complaints were lodged, “We’d see a patrol a little bit oftener for a week or so, and that faded right out again,” she said.

But Rhodes also pointed out that Urbana’s police have been severely understaffed until this year, and the city’s new mayor has promised to hire more officers.

Inside the Urbana Police Department, Schlieter is considered “pretty progressive, as police chiefs go,” said Miller, the union president. “He’s got a pretty liberal bent to his politics.”

“He’s solicited input from the union in the past on issues he thought would have impact on our contract,” Miller said. The three-year contract, ratified last spring, gives Urbana officers a 3% annual raise for the next two years and a 3.75% raise in the final year, Miller said.

Some officers gripe about some of Schlieter’s policies, Miller said.

“But generally speaking, police officers are complainers,” he said. “With any police administrator, you’re going to have people that are not going to care for him.”

Most officers welcomed Schlieter’s appointment by Urbana’s board of aldermen in March, 1991, Miller said.

The previous chief was a firefighter who had been appointed as Urbana’s public safety director, but Schlieter is a cop, Miller said.

In his three-year tenure, Schlieter has brought community policing to one of Urbana’s tougher neighborhoods, computer terminals to its patrol cars and the DARE anti-drug program to its schools, officials said.

“The man has a lot of good ideas,” said Urbana Assistant Chief Charles Gordon. “Some of them have been instituted. I never agree with anyone all the time, but we’ve been able to work with each other.”

The squad car computers have helped officers zero in on certain crimes. For example, Gordon said, one officer focusing on car thefts was able to spot 18 stolen cars, many with the thief still driving, in one year.

The fledgling community policing program--so far just a single officer permanently assigned to patrol and getting acquainted with one crime-ridden census tract-- “has been going very well,” Gordon said. “I have no doubt it’s going to cause some problems, but the acceptance of the community has been very good.”

While refusing to confirm sources’ reports that Schlieter is the top choice, Simi Valley City Manager Lin Koester said the top candidate is “fiscally responsible, very well-spoken, articulate, knowledgeable in the advances of law enforcement . . . . The person understands the future of law enforcement as community-based.”

Schlieter served as police chief in Los Alamos, N.M., for four years until 1988, and earlier was chief in Taft, Calif., and an officer for 15 years in Santa Clara, Calif., where he reached the rank of detective sergeant.

An Urbana newspaper reported Schlieter was a top candidate for the chief’s job in Longmont, Colo., last October. But police in Longmont said the city chose a Boulder police commander instead in December.

Schlieter has five children. His second wife brought two children to their marriage in 1992, and he has three adult children by his first wife, Patricia. She died in 1992 after lapsing into a six-year-long coma following a botched operation, over which Schlieter said he sued for malpractice.

Born in Wisconsin, son of a career U.S. Army officer, Schlieter said he moved around a lot. He went through 18 grade schools and four high schools with his father’s changes in assignments, he said.

He said he earned a master’s degree in criminal justice administration from San Jose State University and a bachelor’s degree in law enforcement administration with a minor in psychology from San Jose State College.