Citizen Support for Williams Remains Strong

As Police Chief Willie L. Williams battled Wednesday to survive the mounting criticisms of the Police Commission and the high city officials who concur with it, people on the streets of Los Angeles rendered their own verdict: It’s time to forgive and move on.

While the commission has criticized Williams’ management skills and reprimanded him for allegedly lying about receiving free accommodations at a Las Vegas hotel, many residents expressed more resentment at the officials chiding Williams than at the immensely popular chief, who denies any improprieties.

“He must have stepped on someone’s toes and they’re out to get him,” said Patti Sommers, a film company secretary interviewed at a Century City mall. “It’s politically motivated. How can you get angry because someone’s wife used a coupon for a free room? . . . Poor guy, he’s doing a great job.”

From the Eastside to the San Fernando Valley to South-Central Los Angeles, citizen support for Williams reflected the reservoir of community goodwill he has developed during his nearly three years as chief. Opinion polls show him to be one of Los Angeles’ most popular public figures, due in part to his ceaseless outreach and the contrast between him and his predecessor, the more autocratic Daryl F. Gates.

Williams’ schedule routinely includes one or two meetings a day with community representatives, occasionally including some of the department’s sharpest critics. He has visited churches, auditoriums and college campuses in virtually every neighborhood in the city.

Support was echoed in the Pico-Union district, where Gates had alienated many in the largely Latino immigrant community.

“I think the community has a good feeling about Williams,” said Celia Grail, executive director of El Rescate, the social service organization. “Doesn’t it seem like they’re trying to railroad him?”

In Koreatown, Jay Shin, owner of a liquor store, said Williams is “definitely an improvement over Gates.”

“By comparison, Williams has been sensitive and reached out to us,” Shin added. “Any police chief of Los Angeles should be sensitive to all the communities.”

Still, Shin said he was concerned by the allegations about the free hotel room, and even more concerned that Williams is accused of lying about it.

Although others suggested that such charges are trivial, Shin believes they are significant.

“He deserves to be reprimanded if he has violated Police Department rules,” Shin said. “Whether you’re the President of the United States or the police chief of Los Angeles, rules are rules. If he received free lodging, made compromises on his job, the Police Commission was correct in reprimanding him. . . . And I have problems with him lying to the commission.”

In South-Central Los Angeles, members of the black community offered strong support for Williams, despite reservations over the hotel room.

Hoyd Fletcher, owner of a barbershop on Florence Avenue, said that although Williams should not have accepted the room, the chief probably was being singled out for criticism because he is black.

Theodore Shakir, who owns a store across the street, agreed.

“There still are a lot of people at the LAPD who support Gates,” who was forced from office in the aftermath of the police beating of Rodney G. King, Shakir said. “And Williams being a black doesn’t help things. They don’t want a black man in a leadership position.”

Shakir said the free room was insignificant.

“Diplomats and other leaders don’t pay for rooms when they travel,” Shakir said. “The whole thing seems blown out of proportion.”

Fletcher, like a number of citizens interviewed throughout the city Wednesday, said he was troubled by the Police Commission’s allegation that Williams lied.

“When they catch you in a lie like that, you lose your reputation,” Fletcher said. “He should have just said, ‘Yeah, I did it and I know it’s against the policy.”

To be sure, there are several quarters where Williams is found wanting.

The rank and file officers often grouse privately about the man they salute in public, complaining bitterly that the department lacks leadership. They say that Williams, who came here as chief from Philadelphia, is an outsider who fails to understand their problems and has done little to improve working conditions.

The Police Commission, appointed by Mayor Richard Riordan, has found that Williams seems “to lack focus and discernible purpose in managing the department,” later suggesting that the chief had failed to set standards that were beyond reproach.

Nevertheless, most people on the streets still seem to believe that the LAPD is better since Williams arrived, and that he deserves much of the credit.

“People up here, they think about his involvement in the community,” said Vito Latino, owner of a service station in Sunland.

“A couple of months ago, we gave him a plaque, made it a community affair, presented it to him for his involvement in community policing,” Latino said. “It shows, for once, that the police are listening to what the citizens need.”

Even critics agree that Williams, who arrived in still-shaky Los Angeles barely two months after the riots in 1992, has worked tirelessly to turn around the department’s image. At the time he came here, polls showed that more than half the city’s residents had lost faith in the Police Department.

By last summer, more than two-thirds of the city residents polled by The Times said they approved of the job the Police Department was doing. A majority of blacks, who traditionally have been more critical of the police than have whites, said they, too, approved of the police force.

On the city’s largely Latino Eastside, some speculated that criticism of the chief has been fueled by City Hall insiders who want to make a puppet of the LAPD’s top administrator.

“He’s doing a wonderful job. I don’t think it’s fair,” said Eliseo Cordero, a longtime member of the El Sereno Senior Citizen Center. “I think he’s a great man.”

Cordero, 73, said Williams visited the center about two years ago and listened patiently to concerns about the need for more patrols and for better police-community relations.

“Things got cleaned up pretty good [since then],” Cordero said. “All the police seem to be more at ease. I would say the chief had something to do with it.”

On the Westside, Pat MacCallum said the chief “is being mistreated and it’s unjust.”

“Los Angeles just can’t seem to hang onto its police chiefs,” MacCallum said.

Times staff writers Duke Helfand, K. Connie Kang, Adrian Maher, Patrick McDonnell, John Mitchell and Jack Cheevers and special correspondents Kay Hwangbo and Tim May contributed to this story.