Police Chief Claims Victory; Others See Credibility in Doubt : LAPD: Williams says council has restored his integrity, vows to mend ties with mayor, commission. But backers and critics both say reversing reprimand without review undercuts his ability to lead.

Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams, shrugging off the angry, discouraged grumbling of many LAPD officers, proclaimed victory Wednesday in his battle with the Police Commission, announcing that a controversial City Council vote had cleared his name, affirmed his integrity and restored his reputation.

“I have received that which I requested,” said Williams, who described the council action as the “correct and favorable conclusion” to a debate that roiled City Hall and the Police Department for weeks.

Dressed in a suit and standing behind a lectern adorned with the LAPD seal, Williams relished the City Council’s 12-1 vote to overturn his reprimand by the Police Commission, whose five members concluded that Williams had made false statements to them about accepting free accommodations in Las Vegas. At the same time, the chief, who is three years into a five-year term, pledged to restore relations with the rest of the city leadership, including the commission that upbraided him and Mayor Richard Riordan, who stood by that decision.

But even as Williams was declaring himself the winner in the controversy, others close to the chief said the public dispute--and its strange ending by the City Council, which overturned the commission’s reprimand without reviewing the facts of the case--had badly undermined Williams’ credibility and had undercut his ability to lead the LAPD.

According to those sources, the dispute has so inflamed tensions between Williams and the Police Commission that his chances of being reappointed to a second five-year term now seem extremely remote. Moreover, many officers and others said the resolution to the debate did little to restore Williams’ integrity, a step that some police officials viewed as essential to him reasserting leadership for the balance of his term.

The result, according to some supporters as well as critics of the chief: a profoundly Pyrrhic victory that cripples Williams’ ability to manage even as it keeps him in his job.

“They absolved him of wrongdoing without trying to determine whether he did anything wrong,” one high-level officer said. “That’s irresponsible. . . . That’s not the way you do things, and it really doesn’t help him.”

A City Hall staffer was more blunt. The council action, he said, was “a murder-suicide that killed both the council and the chief.”

Police commissioners were angered and puzzled by the council’s action, which they said weakened their ability to manage the Police Department by suggesting that Williams no longer needed to be responsive to his civilian bosses. After first wrestling with how to proceed, two of the commission’s leading members released a statement asking the council to spell out who is in charge of the LAPD.

“The commissioners will be calling upon the council leadership to establish a mechanism for clarifying the respective authorities and responsibilities of the commission and council,” according to the statement, written by commission President Enrique Hernandez Jr. and Commissioner Gary Greenebaum. “Without this clarification, it is no longer clear what powers the Police Commission now holds.”

The determination by those two commissioners to pursue the matter ensured that the issue council members had hoped to end for good would stay alive for at least a while longer, prolonging a controversy that has preoccupied the city government and Police Department for more than a month. In addition, the city’s Ethics Commission has launched its own inquiry, which sources said is continuing despite the council’s action.

Nonetheless, in the City Council chamber Wednesday, the mood was upbeat and self-congratulatory. Council President John Ferraro praised colleagues for working “long and hard” on ending what was escalating into a divisive, potentially expensive issue.

Later, Ferraro told a reporter that he had called Riordan after the council decision Tuesday and told the mayor, “I think this is the best thing for the city,” then made a similar call to Commission President Hernandez on Wednesday morning.

But another council member who voted to overturn the reprimand said it was a vote cast “with a heavy heart. . . . There are no winners. The commission didn’t win. The chief didn’t win.”

That council member, who requested anonymity, reported that calls from constituents were running overwhelmingly against the council’s action. Others said that few constituents contacted their offices, and that those who did seemed mildly supportive.

Only Councilman Richard Alatorre voted against overturning the reprimand, and on Wednesday he was still angry.

“It was clear nobody wanted to deal with it,” he said, “but we should have at least read it first. At least then what we did would have been based on the facts.”

“This doesn’t help Williams, either,” Alatorre added. “He was not vindicated. How could he be when the allegations weren’t ever looked at?”

In contrast, Councilman Nate Holden, a staunch Williams supporter, said the Police Commission erred in taking the chief to task on an issue that many considered relatively inconsequential--the acceptance of free Las Vegas accommodations and Williams’ truthfulness when asked about it.

“They went for the jugular, but the knife wasn’t sharp,” said Holden, adding that he got 10 calls from constituents praising the council for dropping the matter and only one critical of it.

Despite the toll that the issue already has taken, not all LAPD officers were convinced that the issue had debilitated the chief. A few members of the chief’s inner circle attended his news conference to show support, and the president of the Oscar Joel Bryant Assn., which represents African American LAPD officers, backed the chief and urged all parties to move on.

“Now that this is over, give him the chance to run this department,” said Sgt. Leonard Ross, the organization’s president. “Let’s let the man do his job.”

Williams himself seemed to rejoice in the outcome of the controversy. Aides said he was in good spirits Wednesday morning, cheerfully greeting colleagues and accepting their congratulations on the council vote.

When he appeared for the news conference, Williams bounded up the stage at the Parker Center auditorium, delivered a short statement and took a number of questions from reporters, fielding them with an aplomb that has been missing from his media sessions in recent weeks. He dismissed one question as “silly” and declined to answer it; others he responded to forcefully.

In his statement, Williams also sounded a note of conciliation.

“I will continue to run the LAPD, do the job of chief of police the way the men and women of my organization and my community expect,” he said. “I am reaching out for others to stand and join me to lead this great organization in this great city.”

Asked how the council action could clear his name when the members had not reviewed the facts of the case, Williams replied: “I don’t think that there’s a shadow of a doubt that when 12 people made a decision to do as they did yesterday, they clearly saw little or nothing sitting there before them worthy of any significant review. It was going to hurt the city, hurt the chief and hurt the Police Department. So I feel that my integrity and my honesty [have] been maintained.”

Others were less convinced. Senior members of the chief’s staff said that only a full repudiation of the allegations would have reclaimed Williams’ name within the Police Department, a view echoed by a number of rank-and-file officers.

Williams’ attorney, Melanie Lomax, acknowledged that the council action fell at least somewhat short of a full exoneration. Instead, Lomax characterized the vote as “95% of what the chief wanted.”

“The other 5%, it came up short,” Lomax continued. “But you weigh that against the prolonged nature of this, the potential damage to the city, the litigation of the relationship with the Police Commission, and the chief decided that the council’s action was the right one.”

According to sources inside the LAPD and close observers of the department, the reprimand by the Police Commission has deepened uncertainty in the department’s upper ranks about Williams’ suitability to lead, and has further raised doubts about his management skills. Williams has both confirmed and downplayed reports of dissatisfaction with his leadership--Wednesday he said such views are advanced mainly by those “who try to try on my seat at night”--but Lomax said her client had recognized that he needs to change some aspects of his style.

“He has heard some of the criticism,” she said. “I think he would concede that there are some things he would like to do differently and one is the way he communicates.”

Lomax did not elaborate. Members of the Police Department’s upper echelon have complained that Williams has become increasingly isolated in recent months, shunning input from many of his subordinates and relying on a small coterie of loyalists.

At his news conference, Williams denied that he has been reclusive, citing his extensive travels throughout the city and the Police Department.

“If you want to take a look at the schedule that I’ve had for the last six months, and you find some way that I’ve been reclusive,” he said, “I wish you would identify for me what being outgoing means.”