Simi Chief Winds Up 1st 100 Days With No Rush : Police: Official takes slow, thoughtful approach to job. But critics say he has been all talk, no action.

By all accounts, new Simi Valley Police Chief Willard R. Schlieter has spent much of his first 100 days in office doing just what he said he would do:

Listening. Studying and planning. Thinking.

As chief of police in the safest city of 100,000 or more in the United States, the 53-year-old transplant from Urbana, Ill., has time for reflection--a luxury that new chiefs at harried departments in crime-ridden cities seldom enjoy.

While theirs is a task of moving from one crisis to another, Schlieter’s is one of fine-tuning an already respected and reasonably smooth-running department, Simi Valley officials and Schlieter’s own officers say.

Yet, privately, some of his officers say Schlieter (pronounced SHLY-ter) is taking too much time to act.

They complain of stagnation in his first 100 days, which end Wednesday, and they say they want the chief to take charge and give them some direction.

“From sergeants to lieutenants to secretaries, everybody’s saying, ‘He’s been here three months, when’s he going to do something?’ ” said Sgt. Gary Collins, president of the Simi Valley Police Officers Assn.

“Now that he’s had a chance to look at us, what needs to change? What’s good? What’s bad?” Collins said. “We’re still waiting for a general consensus of where we are and where we should be.”

In his first three months, Schlieter has been meeting regularly with city officials and union officials, low-level officers and top-level commanders, Collins said.

“If talk leads to action, it’s good,” he said. “But if it doesn’t, it’s really frustrating.”

Schlieter said he refuses to be rushed into announcing any long-term plans.

“I can see they’re anxious to see something perhaps new and different,” he said recently. “But it’s premature of me to make that kind of announcement public without making sure we know where the department is going in the next three to five years.”

The critics do not understand the job of organizing a department of this size, Schlieter said, reminding that he promised to move carefully when he first took office March 7.

“I never came in and proposed an instant solution,” he said. “Any manager would be foolish to make rash decisions based on emotions rather than fact.”

On his first day at work, Schlieter faced some hard facts.

For one, the department’s Cochran Street headquarters had been badly damaged by the Northridge earthquake. For another, two lieutenants’ vacancies had been left unfilled amid a festering internal dispute.

The Jan. 17 quake sank the building’s east wing six inches into the ground, broke sprinkler pipes and split interior walls at the seams.

The ranks, from patrol officer to captain, were anxious to see the building fixed--or, better yet, replaced.

Schlieter squeezed meetings with architects and city planners in between briefings on his department’s operations and its history of internal disputes, and pushed plans for a new headquarters onto the front burner.

Less than two weeks from now, Schlieter said, the architect will deliver rough floor plans, including design suggestions from officers of all ranks.

Schlieter also has had to clean up some bad blood between union members and management that developed last year during the tenure of his predecessor, Chief Lindsey Paul Miller.

Two lieutenants’ positions had been unfilled for months, and a sergeant who was promoted to one of them actually gave up his lieutenant’s bars and dropped back to his old rank.

Sources inside the department have said the posts remained open because no one qualified wanted to work that close to Miller.

Seeing this, the city advertised the lieutenants’ slots to officers outside Simi Valley, which greatly angered local union officials and led to bickering between them and management.

“There were some internal personality issues,” conceded City Manager Lin Koester. “That’s water under the bridge. We needed to identify what those issues are. We’ve identified them and understand them, and Mr. Schlieter is going to get an understanding of that.”

Indeed, Schlieter has already set the promotions back on track and begun shaking up some command assignments: Later this summer, about a dozen Simi Valley sergeants will test for the two lieutenant slots, and a dozen more officers are already vying for three vacant sergeant jobs, said Capt. Jerry Boyce.

And Schlieter said he plans to rotate the existing lieutenants through specialty assignments such as the Special Enforcement Detail, traffic division and administrative division.

“I’ve announced to all the lieutenants that now’s the time to make known to me the assignments they’d like,” he said. “It’s important to me to make these changes. We need to get focused on some issues, and it will help instill a little enthusiasm in people.”

After the shake-up, he added: “We’ll see other movement in the department.”

Meanwhile, Schlieter said he also plans to start hammering out the first comprehensive contract with the Simi Valley Police Officers Assn., as he did with union officials while he was chief of the Urbana Police Department. The Simi Valley union has existed for years on a two-page labor agreement and a series of rider letters addressing individual work issues. By September, Schlieter said, he hopes to have a memorandum of understanding worked out with the union.

The new chief said he also is studying ways to get his department even more plugged into the computer age.

Schlieter said he has requested new laptop computers that will help detectives in the field save time by banging out reports that can be transferred instantly to the department’s mainframe. He also has ordered software that will let police artists work with witnesses to generate quick computer sketches of crime suspects.

And he is considering asking for city funds to install computer terminals in police cars, as he did in Urbana.

Ideas like these will help the Simi Valley Police Department keep pace with the future, said Mayor Greg Stratton.

“The Police Department as an entity has got to recognize it’s going to be a new world,” Stratton said. “From my work (for a defense contractor), I know what the soldier of the future looks like and what the technology is capable of doing. . . . And as that technology becomes converted to civilian use, the logical first place for it is the Police Department.”

City Manager Koester said she is happy with Schlieter’s work. “I plan on reviewing his performance about the first of July, and if things proceed as well as they have for the first three months, there’ll be a 3% salary increase (for him).” Schlieter’s marching orders were to study and modify the department’s organizational structure, to examine labor relations and to scrutinize everything from policy to police cruisers--and he has followed orders, Koester said.

“I asked him to look at short-term and long-term plans, and I left it to him to define short- and long-term,” Koester said last week.

But all this circumspection has left Schlieter’s officers hungry for some kind of action, said Collins, the union chief.

“The overall feeling is we’re adrift, but when you try to pin people down as to what they’re talking about, they can’t put it into words,” he said.

The department still suffers from some internal conflicts between some officers and groups of employees, and Schlieter is not making the best use possible of individual officers’ strengths, Collins said.

“In the short term, we’re looking for him to put a stop to the internal problems and get us focused,” Collins said. “And in the long term, we need him to tell us what the plan is.”

Capt. Jerry Boyce, who has served under both Schlieter and Miller, dismissed Collins’ remarks as motivated by union politics, and the complaints from other officers as vague.

Far from being idle, Schlieter has been working hard on the earthquake repairs, the new building plans, the openings for lieutenant and the command reassignments, Boyce said.

“That’s some heavy work for someone in their first 100 days that wasn’t going to do a whole lot until he got a handle on things,” Boyce said. “He is on top of it.”

Boyce added: “Gary (Collins) really doesn’t have a substantive complaint. . . . It’s traditional that the union thinks the union can run the Police Department better than management can.”

Stratton said steering Simi Valley’s Police Department toward the 21st Century is not a rush job.

“That’s the great fuzzy question of what is the police officer of the future going to be,” Stratton said. “Reorganization is what you do when you have a problem, and I don’t think he’s taken over a department with a problem. It may not be optimally structured for the next century, but I’d rather he take his time and restructure it.”

Schlieter said that while he is making command decisions daily, he is still getting his bearings for the long haul.

“I’ve had some periods of downtime, and I’ve had a lot of meetings,” he said. “It’s mostly self-imposed (downtime), and then I’ve had time to pull back and look inside myself and figure out where I’m going.”