Life in Los Angeles has been no day at the beach for the former Philadelphia police commissioner. Even under ordinary circumstances his task would be difficult. The deeply fraternal culture of police departments doesn’t easily embrace outsiders. In Los Angeles, Williams inherits a 7,900-member department that has been under virtual siege, rocked by last year’s videotaped savage beating of black motorist Rodney King and the riots last April that followed the acquittal of four white officers charged in the case. He knows the dimensions of the job ahead of him. “The biggest challenge I face is to bring internal stability to the LAPD,” Williams told NEWSWEEK. “If you’re sick and not feeling well, you’re not going to do a very good job at work. Right now, the LAPD is ill in many places and for many reasons.”
Only a month into the new post, Williams is getting high marks for his bedside manner. He’s quieted fears in the ranks by resisting big personnel shifts and calling for the hiring of 1,000 new cops. His soft-spoken management style has been welcomed by staffers accustomed to the autocratic Gates: Williams not only seeks their advice; he sometimes acts on it. The city’s ethnic communities have also been encouraged by his high profile at neighborhood meetings. Elected officials are heartened by his commitment to community policing, which stresses police presence on neighborhood streets. “He’s had a very auspicious start,” says Deputy Mayor Mark Fabiani. “So far he has acted boldly yet fairly.”
But many L.A. cops are not waiting to see the Williams era through. Departmental retirements so far this year are up more than 200 percent over 1991. “The men and women of the LAPD are like punch-drunk fighters,” says Rod Bernsen, who retired in January after 17 years on the force. “They’re just wondering when the next blow is coming.”
The latest revelations come from “L.A. Secret Police: Inside the LAPD Elite Spy Network,” a new book by journalist Ivan Goldman and Mike Rothmiller, a cop who left the 0CID in 1983. In the aftermath of the Rodney King videotape, many Angelenos find its accounts of rampant racism and brutality, while still unproven, depressingly authentic. For years, rumors circulated that Gates kept J. Edgar Hoover-like files on leading citizens to consolidate his lock on power. Some of the unit’s activities seem like the handiwork of Barney Fife. Rothmiller and Goldman report that the 0CID tried to prove that former governor Jerry Brown and former state attorney general John Van de Kamp were gay.
Detectives found no such evidence but still filled files with meaningless-and unsubstantiated-assertions like the one that Brown painted his bedroom black. The book, a brisk seller in L.A., alleges that the unit also kept files on everyone from Mayor Tom Bradley, anchorwoman Connie Chung and Barbara Streisand to Gates himself. Gates has denied the allegations, describing Rothmiller as a disaffected officer. Shortly before publication last month, Williams ordered an after-hours sweep of 0CID offices. When members of the elite 45 member team showed up for work the next day, officers from Williams’s staff were already inspecting the files. Later he had a tense confrontation with members of the unit. “First there was quiet and then anger. It-wasn’t very pleasant for me,” he says.
Williams is accustomed to tough jobs. The son of a meatpacker, he broke in with the Philadelphia park police in 1964, earned a college degree attending night school and worked his way through the ranks to become the city’s first black police commissioner in 1988. Williams promoted community policing and helped restore the reputation of a department notorious for wielding excessive force. The Rodney King beating so appalled him that he ordered a tape of the incident be played in training sessions. Months later, when L.A. went looking for a new chief, Williams told friends he was interested.
Williams was in Philadelphia awaiting Gates’s retirement and his installation as chief when Los Angeles erupted into riots last April. As one of his last acts in his home town, he walked the streets of Philadelphia urging calm. At one point, a crowd gathered around Philadelphia’s top cop, chanting, “Don’t go, don’t go.” It will be quite some time before Willie Williams hears the same refrain in the streets of L.A.
