Police Commission Files Appeal on Gates Ruling : King case: Board seeks to overturn judge’s decision that City Council could reinstate chief. ‘The big issue in this case is who is in charge’ of the department, the panel’s attorney says.

The Los Angeles Police Commission, struggling to retain its control over the city’s Police Department, on Thursday appealed a Superior Court ruling that effectively overturned the commission’s decision to place Police Chief Daryl F. Gates on an involuntary 60-day leave.

The appeal will revive a bitter turf battle between the civilian Police Commission and the City Council over who has authority to discipline the chief and manage the 8,300-member Police Department. The case is also likely to have broad ramifications for other city agencies managed by civilian commissions.

“The big issue in this case is who is in charge of the Police Department,” said Hillel Chodos, the commission’s attorney. “We believe it’s the Board of Police Commissioners.”

The commission is asking the state Court of Appeal to set aside the May 13 order of Superior Court Judge Ronald M. Sohigian, who ruled that the council could reinstate Gates as part of a settlement of a lawsuit the chief had filed. Sohigian based his decision on the City Charter, which he said gives the council control over litigation.

But Chodos argued that when the Charter was redrafted in 1925, its authors clearly intended to take authority over the Police Department away from the City Council and put it in the hands of a civilian commission appointed by the mayor.

“It is inconceivable,” Chodos wrote in a 50-page brief, “that the framers of the Charter intended, by the mere insertion . . . of the ‘control of litigation’ clause, to manufacture a loophole through which the entire carefully designed structure of city government could be made to unravel. . . .”

Moreover, he argued that Gates’ lawsuit against the city was “nothing more than a fabricated pretext” that would enable the City Council to overrule the commission and reinstate the chief under its settlement powers.

The legal controversy grows out of the commission’s April 4 decision to place Gates on a 60-day administrative leave with pay. The following day, after Gates threatened to sue, the council voted to reinstate him as a settlement for the suit, which had not yet been filed. What followed was a lengthy court battle before Sohigian.

On Thursday, lawyers for both Gates and the council dismissed the commission’s claims, saying the panel is rehashing old issues that Sohigian has clearly settled. “It’s nothing new,” said Gates’ lawyer, Harry Melkonian. ‘We’ve heard it all before.”

The appeal brought praise from Mayor Tom Bradley, who appoints the Police Commission and has called for Gates to step down, and criticism from Councilwoman Joy Picus, who has been a vocal Gates supporter and voted for the settlement.

In a statement issued by his press secretary, Bradley, on his way back to Los Angeles from a literacy conference in Washington, said: “The mayor fully supports the Police Commission’s fight to maintain the citizen commissioner form of government in Los Angeles.”

Picus, meanwhile, criticized the commission for prolonging a controversy that has divided the city in the wake of the police beating of Rodney G. King. Referring to the commission’s recent string of resignations and new appointees, an angry Picus said: “I don’t expect much from a commission where one commissioner served for six months and one has served for six weeks and one has served for six days.”

Also Thursday, lawyers for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference held a news conference to announce plans to appeal the judge’s decision. The SCLC and a coalition of civil rights activists had attempted to prevent the settlement by intervening in Gates’ lawsuit, but Sohigian said they lacked standing.

SCLC Executive Director Mark Ridley-Thomas and attorney Peter Haviland appeared before a phalanx of television cameras at the Court of Appeal clerk’s office on the second floor of the Ronald Reagan State Building in downtown Los Angeles.

“The Charter is the governing document of the City of Los Angeles, not Judge Sohigian’s decision,” Ridley-Thomas said. He distributed copies of a 22-page appeal that he said would be filed later Thursday.

A court clerk later said the appeal had not been filed by the 5 p.m. closing time. SCLC officials referred questions to Haviland, who could not be reached.

Times staff writer Hector Tobar contributed to this story.