Christopher Panel Takes Heed of Critics : King case: The commission increases the number of women on its staff and agrees to hear about the role of women police officers.

Several concerns raised by critics of the Christopher Commission have begun to influence the panel’s inquiry into excessive use of force by the Los Angeles Police Department in the wake of the Rodney G. King beating.

While community activists have failed to win all of their demands, they have brought about changes in the makeup of the staff and caused the panel to pursue lines of inquiry into women’s issues that otherwise may have been overlooked. Critics have portrayed the panel as consisting mostly of wealthy, privileged members while sorely lacking in women and Asian commissioners.

Chairman Warren Christopher has flatly refused requests to add members to the panel or to remove its vice chairman and two staff lawyers. Within the last week, however, he increased the number of women staff members from seven to 12 as a result of criticisms of the panel’s gender composition, he said. The 10-member commission has one woman, two blacks, two Latinos and no Asians.

So far, the demands of community leaders have had an impact on the commission, but not to the extent they would like.

Katherine Spillar, a spokeswoman for Feminist Majority, which wants equal numbers of men and women on all policy-making bodies, said her group has pestered the commission and its staff as well as the mayor’s office to get the size of the commission expanded.

Spillar also has flooded the commission with materials and held discussions with staff members on the subject of how women are treated by police officers inside and outside the department. As a result, Christopher says he has become convinced that her input is of value.

He is particularly interested in Spillar’s contention, borne out in studies, that women police officers might bring a calming effect to volatile situations. The commission has scheduled Spillar to speak in a private hearing next week and asked experts on the subject--including Joanne Belknap of the University of Cincinnati--to testify.

“As we perceive places where we need to broaden our scope, we will,” Christopher said. “The central focus remains the excessive use of force, but we are going to examine any area that may be regarded as contributing.”

To compensate for the lack of Asian representation on the panel, commissioners have made it a point to solicit testimony from members of Asian organizations.

The Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department was formed by Mayor Tom Bradley last month to make an exhaustive review of the Police Department with a focus on excessive use of force. The commission later absorbed a similar panel that had been created by Police Chief Daryl F. Gates. The head of the Gates panel, former state Supreme Court Justice John A. Arguelles, became vice chairman of the commission.

Christopher said women were recruited as commissioners by the mayor’s office, but that as many as four could not make the commitment. To try to add members now, he said, would slow the commission’s work by requiring it to bring new people up to speed.

Spillar’s response is typical of her doggedness on the subject.

“The longer they wait, the harder it gets,” she said. “When we raised it in April they should have done it immediately.”

The commission’s only female member, Andrea Sheridan Ordin, defended the panel’s makeup, saying some of the male members are, in effect, feminists.

“At the leadership level of the staff we have women and minorities, Hispanics and Asians who have leading roles in putting this study together,” she said. “It is beneficial to have a group that is reflective of the community and we have done that if you look at experts upon whom we will rely and the staff.”

Ordin, the former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, agreed that the commissioners and many of the 40-member staff of lawyers are people who have attained an elevated social status. But, she said, their backgrounds reflect a wider range of experience.

To the extent that class differences still exist, she said, those gaps can be filled with the experiences and suggestions of community activists and citizens who appear at public hearings.

Indeed, on May 8, at the first such hearing held outside downtown, one speaker after another provided sometimes emotional testimony of what they said are the indignities that dark-skinned people and the poor suffer daily at the hands of Los Angeles police officers who would not think of behaving in such ways in affluent communities.

Although many of the people who gave testimony at the hearing expressed skepticism about the value of the Christopher Commission and how much change it will bring about, most said they were willing to give the panel the benefit of the doubt and wait for its final report.

One vocal group, however, continues to demand the resignations of vice chairman Arguelles and commission staff members Thomas E. Holliday and Nancy McClelland on the grounds that they are biased in favor of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the Southern California affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview that Arguelles serves as a legal adviser for a conservative group that in a newsletter editorial suggested that anyone who criticizes police is a “whining, anti-cop, pro-criminal hypocrite.” Arguelles did not write or endorse the editorial.

Holliday and McClelland, Ripston said, represented the Police Department and other city agencies in a lawsuit over secret police files in the early 1980s. She said that Holliday also stood in for two weeks as the attorney for a Los Angeles police captain who is being sued in federal court over the 39th Street and Dalton Avenue police misconduct case.

“Over the years there has been a very friendly relationship built up between them,” she said of Holliday and the Police Department. “The purpose of the commission is to look at police in an unbiased way. You can’t do that if you have been counsel to the police.”

Christopher has rushed to the defense of the staff members and Arguelles, saying he is certain that they will be independent, objective and fair.

“The community should not be deprived of their pro bono services because of prior legal representation,” he said. “I am very surprised to hear this from the ACLU, which has represented all kinds of groups and people.”

Christopher’s position was supported by Cruz Reynoso, a professor of law who teaches legal ethics at UCLA. “It is quite erroneous to attribute to a lawyer the views of his client,” he said.

But Reynoso registered his own gentle gripe with the Christopher Commission about its decision to exclude anyone who had already taken a public stand on the Police Department or Gates since the King beating.

“I can understand their great sensitivity in making sure there is not an appearance of conflict,” he said. “But I would have liked to have seen people who were overtly supportive of the LAPD and people who were overtly opposed so serious questions will be raised if the evidence is not very solid.”