Officer in Alleged Campus Romance May Fight Firing

The state Supreme Court has opened the way for a former Los Angeles police officer to challenge her dismissal for alleged romantic activity with a high school football player during an undercover drug investigation.

In a brief order filed Wednesday, the justices let stand a ruling by a state Court of Appeal last May granting the fired officer, Sharon Fischer, the right to a full-scale hearing to contest the charges.

However, the high court also ordered that the appellate ruling, which city officials argued gave unwarranted procedural rights to probationary officers such as Fischer, may not be used as a legal precedent in other cases.

Fischer, then 22, was assigned in 1986 as an undercover narcotics officer at Kennedy High School in Granada Hills. According to court documents, after some students became suspicious that she was an officer, she sought to regain their acceptance by befriending several members of the football team, including a 17-year-old youth.

After receiving complaints from the boy’s mother, police officials suspended Fischer, charging among other things that she had written suggestive letters to the youth, kissed him and allowed him to sexually fondle her.

In proceedings before a department hearing officer, Fischer denied romantic involvement with the student and said she was only trying to protect herself and her real identity.

After she was fired, Fischer filed suit, claiming she had been improperly denied a full-scale evidentiary hearing before the police Board of Rights. In such a hearing--unlike the proceeding that was held--the city would bear the burden of proving the charges and an accused officer may call and cross-examine witnesses.