Williams Officially Asks for New Term as Chief

Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams ended weeks of speculation Thursday by formally filing his application for a second term, a move that raises the stakes in the high-level political debate over whether he deserves another five years at the helm of the LAPD.

Williams delivered an 11-page letter to members of the city’s civilian Police Commission in which he made his case for a second term. The chief cited his role in the rebound in public confidence in the Police Department, the drop in reported crime and the expansion of the department. He referred to his time at the department as “the resurrection of the LAPD.”

“The last 4 1/2 years have been very busy, very difficult, at times trying and certainly challenging,” Williams said at a news conference Thursday at police headquarters. “I think you know by now I’m not one to duck a challenge. . . . I’ve never thought about walking away right now because I didn’t come here for the short term. I’m an Angeleno.”

The commission, the five-member panel that oversees LAPD policy, has until April 7 to decide on Williams’ application. Nothing prevents the panel from acting more quickly, meaning that a decision could come anytime in the next few months.

“I would not want to drag this out,” Commission President Raymond C. Fisher said. “I would like us to try to make an expeditious decision, but not to rush it.”

The commission’s decision will mark the first test of a selection process approved by voters in a 1992 police reform measure. The commission has the job of evaluating Williams’ performance over the past 4 1/2 years, a tenure that has been marked by improved police-community relations and by falling crime rates, but which also has featured criticism of the department’s management and nagging doubts about the chief’s competence and integrity.

Mayor Richard Riordan has consistently declined to comment on the chief’s prospects for a new term, and a spokeswoman for the mayor Thursday reiterated his intention to leave the matter to the commission.

Fisher said the commission would take the matter up at its regularly scheduled meeting next week and would try to reach a decision by the end of February. The terms of the commission debate remain to be worked out--delicate issues of privacy surround the chief’s evaluation, but they are accompanied by broad public interest in the chief’s future.

Survey by Supporters

Just hours before Williams submitted his application, a group of his supporters released results of an informal survey in which nearly 62% of respondents said he should be reappointed as L.A.’s top cop.

“We want the citizens to be a part of the mix. . . . Too few people are involved in the power circle,” said Celes King, state chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality, which sponsored the survey. “It’s a political decision, but that political decision is going to impact on all of us and we want the people’s voice to be heard in Los Angeles.”

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), a likely candidate for mayor, on Thursday called Williams a “stabilizing force” who deserved a second term--while Riordan has expressed concerns about the effectiveness of LAPD management. City Council members are divided on the merits of rehiring Williams, with most leaning against the chief but a few strongly favoring him.

Those elements--combined with Williams’ formidable popularity and the difficult racial politics of evaluating the city’s first black police chief--promise to make the debate a delicate and potentially divisive one.

Williams arrived at the LAPD with great fanfare, inheriting a department rocked by the beating of Rodney G. King and the long fallout from that incident. LAPD morale was abysmal and public confidence in the city’s police rock-bottom.

“When we came here, we had a Police Department that was not supported and not trusted by many in the community,” Williams recalled Thursday. “We had ethnic communities that seemed to be pulled apart rather than coming together. We have more than addressed the majority of those issues.”

In his letter and in his comments Thursday, Williams ticked off dozens of accomplishments, ranging from the improvement in departmental technology to the increase in the number of patrol cars on the streets. He emphasized the diversification of the department’s ranks, and the reduction of complaints from the public regarding the use of force or civil rights violations.

“Crime in the city of Los Angeles has declined steadily over the past few years,” the letter continues. “Furthermore, the people of Los Angeles feel safer . . . we have achieved a complete turnaround in the public’s perception of the LAPD. Due in large part to my efforts, the once-exemplary reputation of the LAPD has been largely restored.”

From his earliest days on the job, Williams seemed to embody change. He pledged to reform the Police Department and to infuse it with a philosophy once rooted in the agency but largely forgotten: community-based policing, an approach to law enforcement that emphasizes problem-solving and community alliances over rapid response and mass arrests.

In his first months, the chief aggressively courted public support for the Police Department, meeting with scores of community groups. Warily at first and then with increasing momentum, the city seemed to respond.

The department’s approval rating, which plummeted to 34% after the King beating, climbed steadily under Williams. By 1995, it had reached 71%; a majority of black, white and Latino residents said they liked the job the police force was doing.

Williams’ bosses, the five police commissioners who hired him from Philadelphia in 1992, stood firmly behind him. In 1993, the commission allowed Williams to evaluate his own performance--and then signed off in agreement. Williams gave himself high marks in almost every category, concluding, “I have, as an executive, exceeded the usual expected standards.”

Under Williams’ leadership, the LAPD helped bolster its reputation with its response to flare-ups. A mini-riot on Dec. 14, 1992, was put down assertively and without serious incident, contrasting the LAPD’s tepid reaction to the unrest eight months earlier. In 1994, the Northridge earthquake knocked out power and city services, but the LAPD responded with speed and vigor. In the chaotic days that followed, many agencies were overwhelmed, but the disaster was marked by a noteworthy absence of looting, at least in part thanks to the Police Department’s actions.

But even as the LAPD was beginning to regain public acclaim, doubts were growing behind the scenes about its leader.

Between crises, the city’s police complained of little guidance or direction. Community policing was a watchword, but department leaders struggled to define it and put it into practice. Crime-fighting sometimes seemed lost in a department increasingly pulled in different directions.

And many of the reforms recommended by the blue-ribbon Christopher Commission in 1991 languished. A highly touted computer tracking system to spot early signs of trouble in officers made little progress. A proposed unit to root out sexual harassment and discrimination moved ahead in fits and starts.

Conflict With Commission

A year after Williams had glowingly assessed his own performance, a new Board of Police Commissioners, this one appointed by Riordan, came to starkly different conclusions.

That commission, headed by reform advocate Gary Greenebaum, credited Williams with helping reunify Los Angeles but raised concerns about his leadership.

“Consistently, you seem to lack focus and discernible purpose in managing the department,” the evaluation said. “It is often unclear throughout the ranks exactly who is in charge, and who is making decisions affecting the operations of the LAPD. Often, you seem unable to move the department, to have your decisions understood and followed in a timely manner, if at all.”

Among other things, commissioners warned that Williams needed to do more to take charge of the LAPD’s officer-involved shooting policy, that he needed to resolve a long-brewing dispute with one of his top deputies, Bernard C. Parks, and that he needed to cede to the board’s policymaking role.

Three months later, Williams abruptly demoted Parks, a move that earned him the animosity of many political leaders who had long admired Parks. Critics of the move, who previously had been reluctant to take on Williams publicly, became emboldened in the months that followed.

By the following year, the commission’s concerns about Williams’ management were joined by new and equally unsettling doubts, this time about his honesty. Acting on a letter submitted to them by a retired LAPD deputy chief, the commission asked Williams whether he had ever accepted free accommodations from Las Vegas hotels and other gratuities.

“I have never accepted without cost lodging, meals and or show tickets at any Las Vegas hotel,” Williams responded in writing. “Whenever I stayed in Las Vegas I paid all bills due from my personal expenses.”

But the commission’s investigation raised serious questions about the truthfulness of that response. In fact, receipts from Caesars Palace showed that on at least five occasions either Williams or members of his family had accepted “comped” accommodations and other services.

The commission unanimously voted to reprimand Williams for lying about the Vegas hotel rooms. Williams appealed to the City Council, which, fearing a racially divisive fight, overturned the reprimand without analyzing the evidence against the chief.

When that evidence later became public--copies of the investigative file were obtained and published by The Times--Williams responded by filing a $10-million claim against the city. After council members agreed to direct a leak investigation, Williams withdrew the claim. That investigation came up empty, and the fracas badly damaged the chief’s relations with the council and the commission.

Williams never fully recovered from that series of missteps, and his relationship with his own officers, never strong, steadily deteriorated. His initially tepid support for the officers who investigated O.J. Simpson angered them and their colleagues, as did Williams’ failure to return from Las Vegas after the fatal shooting of a police officer in Hollywood.

The chief further antagonized many officers when he publicly vilified two officers whom he accused of lying in court--only to see them cleared of wrongdoing. After winning that vindication, they filed $10-million legal claims against Williams; those cases are pending.

Meanwhile, the LAPD’s investigation into former Det. Mark Fuhrman repeatedly bogged down. More than a year after tape-recorded comments by Fuhrman rocked the Simpson trial and shocked the world, the LAPD inquiry remains unfinished, and the U.S. Justice Department is growing increasingly impatient.

Still another LAPD investigation has run into similar delays. It has been more than eight months since Riordan requested a report from the department on why arrests, traffic citations, field interviews and cleared cases have dropped precipitously in recent years even as the LAPD has been growing. Riordan asked for that report within 90 days; it still is not complete.

Faced with internal and external criticism for those and other controversies, Williams’ job approval rating dropped sharply. Once an impressive 73%, it stood at 56% last summer, the most recent time a Times Poll measured it.

On Thursday, Williams acknowledged some missteps but said his successes far outweigh them. He lambasted unnamed critics for “mudslinging” and accused his political opponents of a conspiratorial campaign to “thwart” his agenda for reform.

“There’s people that don’t like the idea that the LAPD is moving away from where it was 10 or 15 or 20 years ago,” he said. “It’s tripped me up a couple of times. I’ve stumbled along the way. But there’s no perfect person--he left here quite a few centuries ago.”

As the end of Williams’ term has drawn near, he and his supporters increasingly have argued that the chief should be judged not on specific management decisions but rather on the Police Department’s statistical record--especially the level of Los Angeles crime and the falling number of citizen complaints about police.

Indeed, by those two measures, law enforcement in Los Angeles is on a more even keel than it was four years ago. Violent crime in the city has dropped more than 20% since Williams took office, declining steadily each year. Likewise, annual complaints against officers have dropped from more than 1,300 in 1991 to 602 in 1995.

But those criteria offer conflicting evidence of Williams’ effectiveness.

Popularity Continues

The drop in crime is part of a national decline. But the local drop is not as steep or as consistent as in some cities, most notably New York, where police have become markedly more aggressive. Similarly, the decline in complaints against Los Angeles police is a welcome development, particularly after the tension of the early 1990s. But other types of police activity also have fallen--LAPD officers are making fewer arrests, issuing fewer citations and conducting fewer field interviews than they did in the early 1990s. As a result, it is unclear whether complaints are down because police are behaving better or merely because they are working less.

Still, Williams’ popularity remains formidable in some quarters. Councilman Nate Holden has emerged as a key backer, and a number of local organizations, particularly in the African American community, have risen to his defense.

“Chief Willie Williams is the guy who can finish the job for us--five more years is in order,” Holden said Thursday. “In fact, we need Chief Willie Williams today more than ever.”

Other observers struck a more cautious tone. Some council members said they intended to defer to the commission, and some reform advocates said only that Williams deserved a careful review, not that he should necessarily win a second term.

“He was an outsider, an African American, coming in behind a chief who was not a stellar progressive,” said Joe Hicks, executive director of the Multi-Cultural Collaborative and a longtime police reform advocate. “He came in with a lot of handicaps. . . . But the discussion has to hinge on police reform and how he has performed.”

Times staff writers Henry Weinstein and Jodi Wilgoren contributed to this story.

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Williams’ LAPD Career

June 30, 1992: Willie L. Williams takes oath as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, the first African American ever to hold that office and the first outsider since 1949.

Nov. 10, 1992: Williams chooses his command staff, naming the first Latino deputy chief in LAPD history and picking Bernard C. Parks, whom Williams beat out for chief, as head of operations.

March 30, 1993: Williams tells Police Commission that the LAPD has fulfilled most Christopher Commission reforms but that some recommendations are stymied by budget shortfalls.

April 20, 1993: Williams unveils LAPD reform plan, proposing a redesign of beat patrols and recommending creation of new citizen councils for police stations.

June 8, 1993: Richard Riordan is elected mayor. He replaces all five Police Commission members, who had hired Williams from Philadelphia.

July 13, 1993: Williams criticizes Riordan’s police expansion plan, saying it is dangerous to expand the department too quickly.

Oct. 13, 1993: Williams and Riordan jointly unveil their police hiring plan, which falls short of Riordan’s pledge of 3,000 additional officers in four years but still calls for a historic expansion of the LAPD.

Sept. 12, 1994: Williams demotes Assistant Chief Parks in a command staff shakeup. Protesters picket police headquarters, and council members come to Parks’ defense, giving him a raise even as Williams demotes him.

May 16, 1995: Police Commission unanimously votes to reprimand Williams for allegedly lying to the board about accepting free perks from a Las Vegas casino. Williams declares: “I am not a liar.” The City Council later overturns the reprimand, prompting two members of the Police Commission to resign in protest.

Sept. 5, 1995: Williams tells council the LAPD has compiled a list of more than 100 potentially problem officers and is monitoring their behavior. Police officials later say there is no such list.

Sept. 15, 1995: The Times publishes details of the Las Vegas investigation, including receipts showing that Williams received free accomodations. Responding, Williams files a $10-million claim against the city for the improper release of his personnel records. He later withdraws that claim after the City Council orders a leak investigation. The source of the documents is never uncovered.

Feb. 13, 1996: Police Commission scolds Williams for purchasing a more expensive official car than the ones provided to his top staff.

March 13, 1996: A report in The Times discloses a sharp five-year drop in LAPD arrests, traffic citations, field interviews and cleared cases, among other things. Riordan asks the LAPD to study the report, which he calls “very disturbing,” and requests a response within 60 days. That response still is not complete.

May 30, 1996. Police Commission special counsel releases a five-year update on the Christopher Commission reforms. Report documents progress on some reforms but says the department’s record is mixed and in some ways disappointing: “The LAPD could benefit from more focused, deft and efficient internal management.”

Aug. 28, 1996: Two police officers who had been denounced by Williams for falsifying evidence--but who were later cleared by a police disciplinary board--file a $20-million claim against him, saying he defamed them.

Dec. 10, 1996: Williams tells supporters he intends to file an application for a second, five-year term but does not actually file the paperwork.

Jan. 2, 1997: Williams files for new term as chief.