Police Privacy Law Comes Under Fire : Misconduct: Two department chiefs are among those telling NAACP hearing that restrictions on release of information should be changed.

A state law designed to protect the privacy of police officers serves to feed public suspicions that law enforcement agencies do not take misconduct complaints seriously, two police chiefs and a representative of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told a panel of civil rights activists Wednesday.

Because they are prevented by the so-called “Peace Officers Bill of Rights” from divulging any but the most limited information about the status of investigations into citizens’ complaints, all three of the officials said, the victims of the alleged misconduct often assume nothing is being done.

“As administrators, we are not happy with this,” said Assistant Chief Richard L. Foreman of the Sheriff’s Department. “About the only response we can give the complainant is to say the complaint was founded and appropriate action was taken.”

Pasadena Police Chief Jerry Oliver and Long Beach Police Chief Lawrence Binkley voiced similar concerns about the law, which prohibits departments from revealing the names of officers under investigation as the result of allegations of misconduct, the status of the investigations and, in some cases, outcomes.

“I believe it is a detriment to the law enforcement community not to be able to give that information,” said Oliver, who said he has worked as a police executive in two other states--Arizona and Tennessee--where no such prohibitions existed. “I would love to be able to give some of that information to the public.”

Oliver, Binkley and Foreman testified during the second day of hearings on police conduct sponsored by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

The sessions, conducted at Patriotic Hall near downtown Los Angeles, are part of a series of such hearings that the civil rights organization is holding in seven cities around the country.

With the information gathered, the NAACP plans to produce a report next year that it hopes will help improve relations between police departments and black communities.

At the hearing Tuesday, witnesses included elected officials and representatives of law enforcement agencies from around Long Angeles County as well as community activists and experts on policing and police-community relations.

Many of them had testified before the Christopher Commission, the citizen panel formed last spring to investigate the Los Angeles Police Department after the March 3 beating of Rodney G. King by police officers.

There had been speculation that the Christopher Commission would recommend that some of the information dissemination restrictions be removed from the “Police Officers Bill of Rights,” but the matter did not come up in the panel’s sweeping report on the department.

On Wednesday, Oliver and Binkley called for changes in the law, which was passed in 1978 to ensure that police officers’ employment rights are protected.

Critics of the law outside law enforcement say it gives officers more rights than ordinary citizens.