Gay Deputy Reinstated, Ends Lawsuit : Law enforcement: Officials had denied bias, saying he was fired for filing erroneous arrest report. They cite ‘new information’ for the department’s about-face.

Bruce C. Boland, a sheriff’s deputy who claimed he was fired last year because he is gay, returned to work Wednesday after agreeing to drop a discrimination suit against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

A department spokesman said Boland was to be assigned to work at a still unspecified site in court services, which means he will not return to the West Hollywood station where he worked for three of his six years on the force.

“It’s been a long, hard battle, and I’m looking forward to getting back,” Boland said before his return to work. “It’s (been) a living nightmare every single day.”

The department’s decision to rehire him came amid hearings earlier this month before the county Civil Service Commission, where Boland had appealed the firing. The two sides settled instead Tuesday, with the department agreeing to reinstate Boland with more than a year’s back pay.

In return, Boland agreed to drop a $90-million lawsuit charging the department with discrimination. Department officials had maintained that Boland was fired for allegedly filing false information in a 1989 arrest report. The department denied that Boland’s sexual orientation had anything to do with his firing.

The attorney handling the department’s case said the about-face came after “new information” emerged during the hearings indicating that Boland had notified prosecutors about errors in the arrest report much earlier than had been believed. And the county’s main witness in the hearings--the man Boland arrested--proved to be a highly unreliable witness on details of the arrest, said Dixon Holston, a senior deputy county counsel.

Boland still faces criminal charges stemming from the incident. Deputy District Atty. Joseph D. Shidler said he has not yet reviewed the Sheriff’s Department’s reversal nor decided whether to drop the charges. A pretrial hearing is set for March 10. But Boland said he is confident that the charges will be dropped.

Boland’s trouble began in April, 1989, after he inaccurately described in a police report where he had found a bag of syringes during a drug arrest. The report said the bag was at the feet of the suspect in the front seat of a car, but actually it had been in the back seat with another man, who was not arrested.

Boland contended that the error was an honest one. He said that upon realizing the mistake, he promptly pointed it out to prosecutors handling the drug case.

But prosecutors said the drug case had to be dropped because the evidence was tainted. After a Sheriff’s Department investigation, Boland was later charged with two misdemeanors and two felony counts in connection with the flawed report, and he was suspended from the force. Boland was fired last April as the case against him moved through the courts.

Boland claimed that the department had singled him out for unusually harsh treatment because he is gay. He appealed his firing to the Civil Service Commission and filed the discrimination suit. After three days of commission hearings, the two sides agreed to settle when Boland’s attorneys produced a memorandum from the county prosecutor’s office indicating that he had notified prosecutors in the drug case about flaws in his report nearly two months earlier than the department had believed, Holston said.

The information was important because it appears to show that Boland had not deliberately falsified evidence nor tried to cover up his error while the suspect remained in jail, Holston said.

Boland said that he is not bitter toward the department: “All I wanted was my job back from Day One. I almost begged for it from Day One.”

The case gained wide attention in West Hollywood, where relations between the department and the city’s large gay community have been uneasy at times. Local officials lobbied for Boland’s reinstatement while gay-rights activists pointed to the firing as an example of discrimination by the Sheriff’s Department and the need for an independent police force in the city.

Despite the public furor, Boland said he has no plans to assume the role of departmental crusader.

“I’m going to stand back and look and see what happens for a while. . . . But, when needed, I’ll offer input,” he said. “As far as being an activist, no.”