When the Chief Is So in Name Only

Scandal has been a constant in the Philadelphia Police Department, the agency that Willie Williams served in and led before coming to Los Angeles. There is no reason to believe that Williams was ever a part of the misconduct within the Philadelphia police ranks; but neither was he notably successful in eliminating or even reducing it. Unless the current debate about the Los Angeles Police Department’s leadership shifts its focus, Angelenos are very likely to find that the LAPD’s current problems also outlast Williams.

Certainly, Los Angeles’ problems have been different from Philadelphia’s. When Philadelphia cops go to jail, it is usually because they have attempted illegally to get rich quick. But it is generally accepted in Los Angeles and in the police community nationally that money corruption is a rarity in the LAPD. Instead, the department in Los Angeles has been estranged from a good part of the community, troubled by insensitivity, overzealousness, racism and brutality. Los Angeles cops who have gotten into trouble have usually been implicated in such “nonprofit” abuses as the 1991 Rodney King beating and the 1988 Dalton Avenue drug raid, in which 80 officers ransacked four apartments near Exposition Park.

Many of the department’s worst characteristics seem to have eased during Williams’ tenure. A couple of years ago, for example, I testified that the LAPD canine unit’s “find and bite” policy was a brand of needless violence not equaled in any other large U.S. city. For several years, the department’s dogs bit 65% of the persons they helped to apprehend, hospitalizing about 150 persons a year with maiming and often crippling injuries. When Williams learned of this, he immediately imposed a “find and bark” policy, consistent with those of other large-city departments. He was later able to testify that the LAPD’s “bite ratio” had decreased to 11% and included virtually no serious injuries.

Now that his five-year contract is nearing its end, Williams certainly has dogs at his own heels. He has become a target for the LAPD’s traditionalists, who rightly point out lapses in his candor and judgment. Other critics have the less admirable goal of dumping Williams in order to put one of their own in the chief’s chair and to return the department to its former bad old ways. On the other hand, reformers criticize Williams because he has not been able to bring the LAPD farther from its old ways.

This debate misses the point entirely. The LAPD’s problems have very little to do with Williams’ strengths or weaknesses, both of which are considerable. Instead, like the police problems Williams did not successfully address in Philadelphia, the Los Angeles department’s weaknesses are structural. In Philadelphia, it does not matter who the police commissioner is because he has virtually no authority to fill key policy and managerial positions with people who share his vision and commitment to reform.

The LAPD situation is only slightly different. By the time Williams took the helm, a referendum had replaced the chief’s lifetime tenure with renewable five-year contracts. But as in Philadelphia, where all but two of the police brass are tenured civil servants, the rest of the Los Angeles executives and managers continue in their tenured autonomy. Consequently, as in Philadelphia, Williams has not been able to assemble a management team that shares his philosophies and goals. Nor does he have the power to dismiss department leaders for lack of commitment to his reform agenda.

Without such authority, no police chief, president or corporate boss can get an organization’s executive corps to readily change their ideas for his or her vision. Think, for example, of what Reagan, Iaccoca, Eisenhower, Truman or any other successful CEO would have been able to accomplish had he been required to keep his predecessors’ top advisors in place regardless of what they thought of him and his agenda. New York’s recent police commissioner, Bill Bratton, asked for and got the resignations of several chiefs who did not share his views, replaced them with young, eager and bright commanders who changed stale police operations. Even the most reluctant criminologists--myself included--have come to acknowledge that these changes helped produce historically unprecedented reductions in crime and incivility on the streets. Regardless of how vigorous or gifted, nobody can do the same in Los Angeles while the police department’s top ranks are filled with immovable objects.

Thus, the question for Los Angeles is not whether Williams has done a good enough job to deserve renewal, but whether the leadership of the LAPD should be restructured to provide its chief with the tools to do a good job. Regardless of whether Williams stays or goes, the Los Angeles chief must have the same authority to select his top staff as do the CEOs of any well-run large organization. Without this power, the boss is a boss in name only; it doesn’t matter much who holds the job.