Police Panel Rebuked Chief, Sources Disclose : LAPD:Williams’ lawyer charges campaign to discredit him. Reprimand involves alleged lies over Las Vegas hotel.

After more than a year of simmering dissatisfaction with Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams, his superiors on the Police Commission have reprimanded him for allegedly lying about receiving free accommodations at a Las Vegas hotel, according to sources and internal police documents.

The decision to reprimand Williams--a punishment that does not carry the financial penalty of a suspension but clearly signals the panel’s waning faith in him--was made by unanimous vote of the commission May 16. Williams has denied committing any wrongdoing, but has declined to comment on the controversy in detail.

“I can’t say anything about this,” he said Tuesday.

His attorney Melanie Lomax said the accusations are part of a politically motivated campaign to discredit the chief.

Recently obtained documents reveal that the reprimand culminates more than a year in which the commission has privately voiced concerns about Williams’ management.

“Consistently, you seem to lack focus and discernible purpose in managing the department,” all five commissioners wrote to Williams in a confidential evaluation dated May 17, 1994, and obtained by The Times. “It is often unclear throughout the ranks exactly who is in charge and who is making decisions affecting the operations and directions of the LAPD.”

In the memo--a performance evaluation that the commissioners said reflected their “collective assessment” of Williams’ performance during the previous 10 months--the board praised Williams for his role in helping restore public confidence in the LAPD but added: “Often, you seem unable to move the department, to have your decisions understood and followed in a timely manner, if at all.”

Seven months after that memo was sent to Williams--and after the commission had undergone a change in leadership--commission President Enrique Hernandez Jr. wrote to Williams expressing concern that the chief’s use of compensatory and vacation time was undermining his ability to lead the department and suggesting that Williams had failed to set standards of professionalism that were “beyond reproach.”

The panel’s scathing evaluations of Williams underscore the depth and intensity of the split between Los Angeles’ popular police chief and its civilian board of commissioners.

Williams was hired amid high expectations that he would usher in a new era of respectability for a department battered by the Rodney G. King beating and its dismal performance during the 1992 riots when Daryl F. Gates was chief. Opinion polls show Williams to be hugely popular and indicate that public perception of the LAPD’s performance has rebounded under the chief’s stewardship.

But now, less than three years later, the department is again embroiled in a nasty conflict over the man at the top, with the rhetoric running high.

The performance evaluation, the December memo and the reprimand all become part of Williams’ official personnel package, the documents that the commission would rely upon in deciding whether to reappoint the chief to a second five-year term--his current term expires in 1997--or whether to fire him. Given the rancor between the board and the chief, few observers now believe that Williams will be appointed to a second term.

The investigation into Williams’ trips to Las Vegas was initiated after a retired LAPD deputy chief wrote to the Police Commission describing rumors of alleged misconduct by Williams. Among the allegations that were contained in the letter were suggestions that the chief had accepted free accommodations in Las Vegas.

After first delaying, the commission hired two investigators to check out the allegations and the board questioned Williams about them. The chief publicly denied accepting free accommodations and similarly denied it to the board, according to City Hall sources. Those same sources said that the commission concluded that Williams had accepted free accommodations, but that the board’s decision to reprimand the chief was based on its conclusion that he had lied to the commission about the issue.

From the start, the controversy over the allegations has been accompanied by the chief’s contention that information about him was being leaked to the media to discredit him. Although the commissioners declined to comment on the growing controversy Tuesday, Hernandez read a statement during the board’s meeting avowing that the panel had respected Williams’ rights and had performed its duties professionally.

“I believe the Police Commission has conscientiously and in good faith carried out its responsibilities and has fully respected the confidentiality of this personnel matter,” Hernandez said.

Some City Council members have suggested that the commission, whose members are nominated by Mayor Richard Riordan, is playing politics with the Police Department. The council interjected itself into the dispute Tuesday by requesting that the commission turn over documents related to Williams.

At Tuesday’s commission meeting, Hernandez announced that the panel had complied with that request.

The commission’s meeting was crowded with reporters, but the man at the center of the controversy was a no-show. Hernandez told the audience Williams had “reported that he has an emergency.”

Shortly after the commission concluded its morning session, the documents that the council had requested were delivered to City Hall, where City Council President John Ferraro initially said he would distribute them to his colleagues. Instead, he turned them over to the city attorney’s office.

Williams’ leading defender in the council has been Mark Ridley-Thomas. Since a story in The Times on Saturday first reported that the commission believed the chief had lied, Ridley-Thomas has been questioning the commission’s motives and insisting that the council be allowed to review the investigation of the chief as well as the commission’s conclusions about Williams’ truthfulness.

“I think it will become necessary for the council to be involved in this, because I fully expect there will be litigation,” Ridley-Thomas said. “It’s the City Council’s job to protect the city from exposure to liability.”

Williams has directed all questions about the issue to attorney Lomax, who said she was preparing to bring suit against the Police Commission. She accused the commissioners of releasing the memos obtained by The Times.

“There is a campaign going on to systematically discredit Chief Williams,” said Lomax, herself a former police commissioner. “It’s very clear that the mayor-appointed police commissioners are engaged in highly reckless conduct that is not only designed to destroy Chief Williams but to destroy his public image.”

Lomax said the leak of the memos evaluating Williams’ performance and use of comp time, coupled with disclosures regarding the investigation into the allegations about Las Vegas, made a lawsuit a near-certainty.

“The chief has notified the city attorney and the Police Commission that this unauthorized release of information can and will lead to litigation,” she said. “There’s no question in my mind that litigation is on the horizon.”

Although Lomax did not spell out the grounds for such a suit, Ridley-Thomas said he believes that Williams has as many as four potential claims against the Police Commission and city: for violating his due process rights, disseminating his confidential employee records, breaching the state’s public meeting laws and threatening the chief not to go public with his side of the dispute.

The prospect of the police chief suing his own bosses posed a vexing set of questions for the city government, which was paralyzed by the attempts to oust then-Chief Gates in the wake of the King beating in 1991.

Ironically, Lomax figured in both disputes, though in strikingly different roles.

In 1991, she was serving as president of the Police Commission fighting with Gates, and now she has re-emerged as the lawyer fighting for another embattled chief of police. In the previous faceoff, Lomax represented a mayoral Administration that argued fiercely that the Police Commission should have the final authority over the chief. In the current dispute, her best hope of protecting her client, Williams, could rest with the intervention of the City Council.

One city official, who asked to remain anonymous, said Williams is determined to remain chief while at the same time suing the city and the commission.

“He’s got to back [the commission] up somehow,” the official said. “What else can he do? He’s got to get them off his back or they’ll ruin him.”

But another City Hall source said it would be difficult for Williams to fight his critics and remain effective. That person said: “How do you say, on the one hand, that you can be an effective chief, and at the same time say that your reputation has been irreparably ruined by what has happened?”

The documents obtained by The Times make clear that the commission’s concerns about Williams reach far beyond the Las Vegas issue. In them, the commissioners raise serious doubts about the chief’s effectiveness as a leader even as they commend him for some aspects of his job performance.

In the May performance evaluation, which was obtained by The Times before controversy over Williams’ Las Vegas trips erupted last week, the board praised his contribution to the reunification of Los Angeles and the rehabilitation of the LAPD’s image in the wake of the King beating and the 1992 riots.

“The department’s re-emerging public image as a preeminent law enforcement agency is due in great part to your personal efforts,” the memo states.

But the panel also chided Williams for shutting out the commission from the development of department policies, including the hot-button topics of community-based policing and sexual harassment in the ranks.

Frustrated by the department’s perceived lack of progress in those areas, the commission has moved to expand its authority--sometimes at Williams’ expense. In the area of sexual harassment, commissioners approved creation of a police unit to root out that problem but, despite Williams’ objections, structured it in such a way that it reports to the commission rather than the chief.

In addition to criticizing Williams’ management of the LAPD, the memo sheds light on the most controversial move of the chief’s tenure, his decision to demote Assistant Chief Bernard Parks, a respected and feared LAPD administrator whom Williams put in the department’s No. 2 job but later ousted.

Williams denied in a June 6, 1994, interview that he and Parks were at odds, but the memo, sent just a few weeks earlier, cites his “indecision regarding the tenure of Assistant Chief Parks” as one of three major areas in which he was failing to act with clarity. Other areas were the lack of a clear plan for restructuring the department’s officer-involved shooting unit and Williams’ alleged lack of “responsiveness to commission requests and deadlines.”

Although the May evaluation detailed a list of commission complaints about the chief’s performance and demanded that Williams accept the panel’s policy-making role, that admonition did not end the rancor. In December, the commissioners again upbraided Williams, this time in a sharply worded order to stop accruing comp time.

That controversy has been previously reported, but the memo has never before surfaced, and the document ties Williams’ use of comp time to broader concerns about his department management.

“As general manager of the Los Angeles Police Department, you must set standards of performance and professionalism that are beyond reproach,” the memo said. “There are issues confronting the Los Angeles Police Department that have now reached critical levels, and the Board of Police Commissioners is deeply concerned that your commitment to aggressively seek resolution to these matters is seriously compromised by your periodic absences from the city.”

Sources close to Williams have said that after the board called the chief’s attention to the dispute over his accrual of comp time, he immediately halted the practice. There have been no further disagreements about that topic, sources said.

Asked about the memos criticizing the chief, Commissioner Gary Greenebaum said he was concerned that they had been made public but declined to address their contents. Greenebaum has previously expressed his desire to see Williams move along some Police Department reforms more quickly, but he would not elaborate Tuesday.

“I don’t think I have anything to add at this juncture,” he said.

Other commissioners echoed Greenebaum’s remarks, saying they did not want to discuss the memos or their evaluations of Williams’ performance.

While commissioners avoided the growing controversy over Williams’ management, Tuesday’s events raised the uncomfortable specter of Los Angeles again battling over the continued service of its police chief.

After a long and contentious dispute between then-Chief Gates and the Police Commission--one in which Gates received the backing of the City Council against the commission--Gates retired. The voters then approved Charter Amendment F, which gave the commission and City Hall greater authority over the hiring and firing of the police chief and imposed term limits on the job.

Those reforms, however, have not headed off a new dispute among a new chief, a new commission and a changed City Council.

“The real lesson here,” said Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, “is that it’s very hard to take the politics out of politics.”

Times staff writer John Schwada contributed to this story.

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Key Dates

A look at the relations between Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams and the Police Commission, which sets policy for the Los Angeles Police Department.

April 16, 1992: Williams, a former Philadelphia police commissioner, is appointed to succeed Daryl F. Gates as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, becoming the first black chief ever to head the department.

July 1, 1993: Richard Riordan is sworn in as the 39th mayor of Los Angeles.

July 9, 1993: One week after taking office, Riordan unveils a new and diverse Police Commission: Rabbi Gary Greenebaum of the American Jewish Committee; Xerox executive Art Mattox, a member of a police gay advisory group; security firm executive Enrique Hernandez Jr.; attorney Deirdre Hill; and Herbert F. (Bert) Boeckmann II, a San Fernando Valley car dealer.

July 26, 1994: Police Commission President Greenebaum hands over gavel to Hernandez.

May 17, 1994: In a performance evaluation, the commission says that Williams seems to “lack focus and discernible purpose.”

Sept. 12, 1994: In a reorganization of the LAPD’s upper ranks, Bernard C. Parks, an assistant chief and 30-year veteran, is demoted after allegedly clashing on a number of issues with Williams.

Dec. 8, 1994: In a letter to the Police Commission Stephen Downing, a retired deputy chief, passes along what he says are a number of rumors about Williams being discussed widely in the department that should be probed and laid to rest.

Dec. 21, 1994: The commission, in a confidential memorandum, warns Williams that his use of comp time is inappropriate and that management of the LAPD is “seriously compromised by your periodic absences from the city.”

Early 1995: Sources say that a second evaluation by the commission suggests that Williams needs to improve some of his work habits and to take firmer command of the LAPD.

May 19, 1995: Sources report that members of the Police Commission have concluded that Williams has “lied” to the panel about accepting free rooms on Las Vegas trips.