Lawmaker Urges Release of Police Brutality Study : Law enforcement: Member of Black Caucus says only full disclosure can help restore the public’s confidence. The report lists 15,000 complaints.

A senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus demanded Tuesday that the Justice Department make public the review it conducted of 15,000 police brutality complaints in response to the police beating of Rodney G. King.

Withholding the report aggravates the “perceived insensitivity” that blacks and other minorities see as the federal response to police brutality nationwide, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said in a news conference marking the anniversary of the beating.

“The Justice Department’s findings on the 15,000 complaints investigated must be released immediately instead of just slipping through the fingers of the bureaucracy,” said Conyers, who is chairman of the House Government Operations Committee. “Otherwise, citizens will continue to have little faith in the integrity of the system. Only through full disclosure can we begin the corrective action necessary to restore confidence in our system of justice.”

But while condemning the Justice Department for sitting on its inquiry, Conyers attempted to minimize the lack of action on a congressional investigation of the King incident and police brutality that he promised about the time the Justice Department launched its much-heralded investigation last March 14.

That investigation by the General Accounting Office “is on track,” Conyers said, contending that the inquiry was initiated last year. Actually, Conyers authorized that inquiry only three weeks ago in a letter to Comptroller General Charles A. Bowsher, a copy of which was obtained by The Times.

The GAO study is focusing on the Justice Department review of the brutality cases and how the department responds to brutality complaints, rather than on the policies and practices of the Los Angeles Police Department, as Conyers had indicated a year ago.

Behind the dispute over studies was the way the King incident gripped official Washington nearly a year ago, after it was repeatedly broadcast by television.

Then-Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh promised a study by his department’s civil rights division of about 15,000 complaints of excessive police force that the Justice Department, FBI and U.S. attorneys across the nation had received over the last six years.

He also directed the department’s research arm, the National Institute of Justice, to examine whether police department training or lack of it plays a role.

Conyers, after meeting with Thornburgh, FBI Director William S. Sessions and other federal officials, expressed satisfaction with Thornburgh’s actions and announced that he was ordering the GAO investigation.

An aide to Conyers on the Government Operations Committee said Tuesday that the GAO study did not go forward because investigators wanted to wait until the Christopher Commission had finished its report on the King beating and the LAPD.

The civil rights division study was completed several months ago and sent to the National Institute of Justice for any additional help, department officials said.

Amy Casner, a spokeswoman for the civil rights division, defended keeping the study secret on grounds that it “is an internal report of sensitive, sometimes criminal, information that is still being used in the research process at the National Institute of Justice.”