Williams Says Emphasis on Values Needed to Stem Crime

WASHINGTON — Los Angeles Police Chief-designate Willie L. Williams on Sunday blamed urban gang violence on a culture bereft of family and individual values where children are deluged by images of random violence “from the time they’re able to walk and crawl.”

Stemming it, Williams said, requires steps beyond strong law enforcement and prisons.

“In addition to putting more dollars into law enforcement, we have to realize that money has to go into the educational system,” he told interviewers on the ABC program “This Week With David Brinkley.” “We have to spend significantly more dollars in our treatment of rehabilitation.

“Police do a good job of locking folks up,” Williams said. “The prisons are overcrowded. We have so many people in prison. And it’s just not working.”

The answer to gang violence, he said, is a complex one. “We’ve got to spend some time. We’ve got to spend some dollars. In addition, we’ve got to find the substitute parents . . . for these young children while they are 6, 7, 8 and 9 years old, get them away from television, because very shortly, all they’re going to know is violence.”

Williams also questioned the effectiveness of capital punishment as a general deterrent to crime, although he said that it might deter certain individuals.

“I am not convinced that capital punishment, in and of itself, is a deterrent to crime,” he said, “because most people do not think about the death penalty before they commit a violent or capital crime.”

Williams, 48, police commissioner in Philadelphia, was named 10 days ago to succeed Daryl F. Gates, who has announced plans to retire in June as chief of the 8,300-officer Los Angeles Police Department.

Williams, who will become the first outsider to lead the Los Angeles Police Department in more than 40 years, conceded that no matter what the outcome of the trial of four police officers in the Rodney G. King beating case, it will be unsettling.

But while Gates has warned that unnamed community leaders might try to foment an uprising if the four white officers are not found guilty of the beating, Williams said that his and Gates’ conversations with community leaders and other people have convinced him otherwise.

“The citizens of this city are trying to put the Rodney King incident behind them,” he said. “There’s a renewed sense of hope within this city and I think, if we all work together, there will be little or no trouble or violence and we’ll start today and move forward in a much more positive manner.”

As he did in a tour of the city after announcement of his selection, the chief-designate promised reform in the department.

“We have to re-examine our training from the top, the chief all the way down to the newest police officer,” he said. “We have to involve the neighborhoods, the people in the communities--with the Police Department . . . not just going out and serving them but working with them, getting them involved in the policies and directions.”

It is important, he said, to make sure that “this department and all the departments in the country much more reflect the community that they serve.”

Asked about allegations of racist attitudes in the Los Angeles Police Department, he said that he expects to encounter no problems as a consequence of being the first minority chief in the city’s history.

“I was the first African-American to head the Philadelphia Police Department and we had some skirmishes in the beginning,” he said. “But pretty soon I was looked at as the chief. (In) the greeting that I have had here, I really haven’t heard anybody say anything about being black.”

Williams’ views on the causes of urban crime, the effectiveness of the death penalty and gun control were at considerable variance with those expressed on the same program by U.S. Atty. Gen. William P. Barr. The two did not appear together but questioners took them over much of the same ground.

While Williams, who agreed with Gates in calling for a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons, spoke of increased funding for education and of finding ways to wean children from television violence, Barr blamed the breakdown of inner-city families on “welfare politics.”

“We now have a situation in the inner cities where 64% of the children are illegitimate,” Barr said, “and there’s very small wonder that we have trouble instilling values in educating children when they have their home life so disrupted.

“We’ve been spending trillions of dollars,” he continued, referring to Great Society programs launched in the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration, “and we’ve built housing projects only to see them taken over by drug addicts and we’ve built schools to see them become battle zones.”

A social agenda, he said, is impossible without strong law enforcement.

While Williams questioned the effectiveness of the death penalty, Barr used last week’s execution of Robert Alton Harris in California as evidence that federal courts are depriving states of “any notion of finality.”

“Even after all appeals have been exhausted, criminal defendants can defer punishment and reopen their cases endlessly by bringing habeas corpus petitions first in the state system and then in the federal,” he said.

The Bush Administration is calling for a one-petition rule, he added. Under it, condemned prisoners would be obliged to put all of their claims in one petition. Once it was acted upon, there could be no more attempts to stay executions unless there is presented a “colorable claim” of innocence.