Woo Tells Panel Review Board May Be Necessary : Police: Christopher Commission hears plea for independent probe of complaints about department.

Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo, in testimony Monday before the independent commission investigating the Police Department, blamed the City Council for failing to pursue police misconduct complaints more vigorously and said a civilian review board may be needed to probe such allegations.

Woo, the first elected city official to testify before the panel, received a standing ovation from the 500 people who crowded into Pacoima’s Maclay Junior High School auditorium for the commission’s third public hearing.

Under the present system, Woo said, he turns complaints coming into his office over to the Police Commission. Officers assigned to the commission then investigate the complaints because that body has no staff. The result is, Woo said, a situation where police are investigating police.

“I accept responsibility along with other members of the City Council for not pursuing these complaints more aggressively,” said Woo, who has called for Police Chief Daryl F. Gates to resign in the wake of the videotaped beating of Rodney G. King. Woo said there is no “independent oversight” of the way complaints are now handled.

Informally known as the Christopher Commission after its chairman, Warren Christopher, the panel met Monday less than half a mile from the site where King was beaten March 3 by officers from the Foothill Division.

The commission heard testimony from witnesses ranging from Woo to the president of an organization supporting Gates, from an National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People official to a Los Angeles police officer.

In addition, more than a dozen citizens testifying as individuals or as members of neighborhood groups recited incidents of alleged police misconduct.

Armando Vasquez, who heads a Sepulveda neighborhood group, told the panel he has started wearing a suit all the time when walking down Sepulveda Boulevard because “you can believe the police will stop you.”

Peggy Rowe Estrada, president of Citizens in Support of the Chief of Police, spoke in defense of Gates, prompting boos from the audience.

Christopher admonished the crowd, saying it was unfair to treat Rowe in such a manner. She then completed her statement, which called for more team policing with an emphasis on providing community service.

Officer Janine Bouey of the African American Peace Officers Assn. was the first police officer to appear during the panel’s public sessions. She told the commission that she had not heard “any member of the department deny that racism exists in the department,” adding that all she had heard were “rationalizations” attributing the department’s racism to attitudes pervasive in society.

Bouey showed the commissioners an enlarged photocopy of a Ku Klux Klan business card she said had been placed on the windshield of her car in a lot to which only officers had access when she was assigned to the Foothill Division in 1989. She testified that she had complained about the card, but the incident was not investigated until last month when she discussed it in a newspaper interview.

San Fernando Valley NAACP President Jose de Sosa said he was confronted in 1988 by Officer Theodore Briseno, one of the four officers charged in the King beating, as he photographed other officers as they questioned four youths. Briseno ordered him to stop taking pictures, De Sosa said.

He said he filed a written complaint at the Foothill Division about Briseno’s “arrogance” and “general rudeness,” but never received a response.

De Sosa said police beatings take place in the northeast San Fernando Valley “all the time,” and the audience shouted: “Every day! Every day!”

Formally known as the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, the panel was formed April 1 by Mayor Tom Bradley to conduct a sweeping review of the department.