Fire Chief Says Video of Women Is Harmless : Personnel: Officials criticize his stand before Fire Commission. Tape shows female recruits struggling with training.

Facing sharp criticism from incredulous city officials, Los Angeles Fire Chief Donald O. Manning and the captain who edited a controversial video of female recruits making repeated mistakes defended the tape Tuesday at a Fire Commission hearing, insisting that it was a harmless production not meant to ridicule women.

“It was intended to be a sort of bloopers-like tape,” Capt. Steve Owens said of the video, which features such scenes as women dropping ladders on themselves and a female recruit injuring her shoulder during training drills last year at the Fire Academy. “It was intended to be humorous.”

Manning said he viewed a portion of the hourlong video two weeks ago and ordered an internal investigation that found no wrongdoing. Still, the chief ordered that the tape no longer be shown because it might be “misinterpreted” as demeaning to women.

“Anything that would . . . bring any discredit, discomfort, we do not condone,” said a stern-faced Manning, who was interrupted several times by Fire Commissioner Leslie Song Winner.

“I’ve seen the tape, and I think it’s just outrageous,” she said at one point. “It just makes you sick.”

Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, meanwhile, introduced a motion Tuesday requesting an independent city investigation to determine how many firefighters were involved in taping and producing the video, how widely it has been distributed and whether any disciplinary action is warranted. Ridley-Thomas’ request for a probe by the chief legislative analyst, the city administrative officer and Personnel Department will be debated by the council next week.

At a City Hall news conference, he and two other council members said they were deeply disturbed that top fire officials would characterize the video as a harmless compilation of bloopers. Such comments, the council members said, show that insensitivity is prevalent at all levels of the 3,100-member department.

“It appears to me that those (officials) at the top of the department just don’t get it,” said Ridley-Thomas, who has seen the video. “It’s our job to see that they do get it.”

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Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, dismissing the chief’s characterization of the video as innocuous, said the tape can be interpreted in only one way.

“Basically, it is a humiliating and degrading film,” Goldberg said she concluded after seeing the video.

City Councilwoman Rita Walters agreed, saying: “I am really shocked by the existence of such a film.”

During the Fire Commission meeting, about 20 minutes of the video was shown on a large screen as department members filled the room to catch a glimpse of the tape and the unfolding drama. One floor below, in City Hall East, another 40 or so firefighters gathered in a room to watch a simulcast of the tape.

At first, Manning said he was only going to show one scene of recruits raising a ladder. But Winner, who sharply questioned the chief and Owens, insisted that one scene would not provide an accurate depiction of the video. She prevailed.

Immediately before the video’s airing, Manning said he did not consider the footage offensive and that he had difficulty determining which recruits were men and which were women because they were decked out in bulky protective garb and sometimes wore face masks.

In his testimony, Manning did not say precisely when he ordered his investigation of the video, which was reported in The Times on Monday. But the department’s spokesman, Assistant Chief Dean E. Cathey, said the probe was under way when the chief first viewed the video two weeks ago.

During the hearing, Winner also criticized the chief for notifying only the board president, Elizabeth Lowe, and not the entire five-member commission about the existence of the video. Winner demanded that Manning provide the commission with a copy of his investigation, which the chief said he would do.

The captain who edited the video told the commission that he destroyed the original copy after he, like the chief, realized that it could be misinterpreted. He said he did not know how the other copies were made or who circulated them. Firefighters have told The Times that the video was shown at a number of stations.

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The disclosure of the video has added fresh fuel to growing concerns over whether the Fire Department--long considered one of the nation’s best--has discriminated against minorities and women. Last month, the city’s Personnel Department released a stinging audit that found that white males dominate the department’s top posts and that women and minorities have been harassed and given unfair evaluations by supervisors, all in an effort to run them off the force.

The existence of the videotape was first revealed in the audit, which quoted a firefighter as saying that copies were floating around firehouses but did not mention how widely distributed they were or who made them. The firefighter referred to the video as “female follies.”

But Owens, the video’s editor, told fire commissioners that the tape was really called “drill tower follies” because the footage shows situations involving both men and women--an explanation that drew a sharp response from Winner. She said firefighters told her that it was actually called “female firefighter follies” and that the video only showed women making mistakes.

Winner questioned how humorous it was to show the female recruit injuring her shoulder.

Said Winner: “I don’t think she found that funny.”