Williams’ Legal Team Wages All-Out Battle

Police Chief Willie L. Williams’ legal brain trust works in the 40th-floor downtown offices of a famous old firm with hooks into power centers from Chicago to New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

There, in the coolly elegant L.A. branch of Chicago-based Sidley & Austin, where former Gov. George Deukmejian is a partner, attorneys Johnny Griggs and Peter Ostroff have put together a fierce campaign that has at least slowed the momentum of the drive to dump the chief. The Board of Police Commissioners, appointed by Mayor Richard Riordan, will decide in the next few weeks whether to give Williams a second five-year term.

Riordan has made no secret about his dislike of Williams, the choice of previous Mayor Tom Bradley’s commission. Riordan has said the chief has moved too slowly to put more cops on the street and modernize the department technically and administratively.

But Williams’ showing in last week’s Los Angeles Times poll reflects the improvement in the chief’s fortunes. A total of 66% of Los Angeles residents approve of the way he is doing his job, a 10% jump since June.

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Thursday, I took the elevator up to Sidley & Austin and talked with Griggs and Ostroff in a conference room with a wide view of the city.

I said the poll numbers were impressive, particularly the improvement in Williams’ standing. I wondered if it would be fair to compare Griggs and Ostroff with Dick Morris, the political consultant who helped engineer President Clinton’s political comeback.

No, they said. “We have not, perhaps out of ignorance, tried to treat this as some kind of political campaign,” said Ostroff.

Whatever they call it, the Griggs-Ostroff strategy of barraging the Police Commission with legal objections and publicly assaulting its integrity is unforgivingly tough. “This commission will do the mayor’s bidding,” said Briggs. Commission President Ray Fisher replied, “Attacking the integrity of the commission is making this process very difficult.”

Griggs, a Sidley & Austin partner, grew up in Ventura, graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, and Yale Law School. Ostroff, a University of Chicago Law School graduate and a Sidley & Austin partner, heads the office’s litigation section.

Ironically, Ostroff got his first legal job in L.A. years ago through Riordan. Ostroff was an enthusiastic Riordan mayoral supporter in the 1993 election. So when Ostroff began working on Williams’ case he told Griggs that he had a moral dilemma. “You don’t have a moral dilemma,” replied Griggs. “You have a client.”

Client Williams has a tough opponent. The mayor is heavily favored to win a second term against state Sen. Tom Hayden. His differences with Williams haven’t seemed to hurt him so far.

But Williams’ has a strong asset. Unlike Riordan, Williams is a good television performer, coming across as a calm, reassuring man.

Williams message is that the LAPD is improving, but it will take five more years to modernize and enlarge the department and to root out racism and sexism. He wants those five more years.

“The city has come together tremendously in the last five years,” he said on the “Today” show the morning after the Simpson civil verdicts, just one of the many national appearances he has made since the Ennis Cosby murder and the verdicts.

He was also on “Good Morning America,” a CNN news segment and “Larry King Live.” Like Clinton during the presidential campaign, Williams seems to prefer these forums to press conferences or long one-on-one interviews with reporters familiar with the intricacies of his job.

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The Christopher Commission did not envision this kind of political struggle when it devised the current system of picking a chief after the police beating of Rodney King. It wanted the selection process in the hands of a civilian police commission that would calmly use the tools of corporate personnel management, setting goals and measuring achievements.

The Christopher Commission didn’t count on combative litigators such as Griggs and Ostroff turning the process into political and legal warfare.

And certainly the Christopher Commission didn’t anticipate a chief who is more at home chatting with TV’s Katie and Larry than he is at City Hall.