Police Panel to Query Chief About Lomax : LAPD: Commissioners say they want to review how Williams’ lawyer got information for a lawsuit.

Reacting to reports that Police Chief Willie L. Williams asked an LAPD captain to gather information about gang activity for the chief’s lawyer, Melanie Lomax, members of the city’s Police Commission said Friday that they are concerned about how the matter was handled and intend to question Williams about it next week.

The commission president, meanwhile, wrote to Lomax asking her not to make future requests through the Los Angeles Police Department chief.

“Given the attention that has been focused on this both publicly and inside the department, it would be best if, in the future, any similar requests from you were appropriately processed through formal department and legal channels,” according to the letter written by Police Commission President Deirdre Hill.

The letter was not signed by other commissioners and does not end the controversy.

The rest of the board intends to take the matter up next week, and two commissioners said they are concerned that Lomax’s request may have been handled inappropriately--especially in light of the fact that Lomax wanted the information for a lawsuit she was bringing against the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“I have concerns that it’s like the good ol’ boy avenues of access are being used around here,” Commissioner Edith Perez said. She emphasized that she wants to review the facts of the controversy before passing judgment.

Similarly, Commissioner Art Mattox said he will withhold comment on the chief’s actions until “I can ask him face to face what happened.” But Mattox added that he, too, is troubled by the incident regardless of whether it resulted in any confidential information being given to Lomax.

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“She has a history of suing the city of Los Angeles,” Mattox said of the attorney, who also is a former member of the Police Commission. “Anyone should have a heightened sense of concern when she is making a request. It should absolutely go through proper channels.”

In an interview, Hill emphasized that she has not received any indication that confidential information was released because of the chief’s call or that Williams committed official misconduct. That closed the matter for now, Hill said, although she added that other commissioners will have the chance to be briefed on it and may choose to pursue it.

The issue revolves around a call that Williams placed to an LAPD captain Nov. 29. According to the captain, who filed a written report after the conversation, Williams told him that Lomax had “done him a couple of favors in the past and that she now needed some information for some community groups with whom she was working.”

The information involved gang activity in the Dorsey High School area, and Williams asked the captain to make it available to Lomax the next day, according to the captain’s report.

After supplying some information to Lomax and being asked by her to get more, the captain said, he saw a newspaper article and concluded that Lomax had been seeking the material for a lawsuit against the school district, not for community groups.

Hill said the chief told her he did not know the information was for the $5-million lawsuit. Lomax told The Times that she had, in fact, wanted the information for that lawsuit, but she said she had never told Williams that.

Lomax also said that the officer who called her did not have the answer to her question, so no information, public or confidential, was given to her.

Hill will present her findings to the rest of the commission next week, but there are signs that other members of the board consider the matter a potentially serious one.

“If the allegations are true, it demonstrates poor judgment on the part of the chief and Miss Lomax,” Perez said. “The appropriate avenues for releasing information, the ones authorized by the manual, were not pursued here. That concerns me.”

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Perez said she was most troubled to learn that Lomax had asked the chief to intervene for her in order to get information--whether public or confidential--for a lawsuit against a government agency, in this case the school district.

“That’s really what is troublesome,” Perez said.

Raymond C. Fisher, another member of the commission, said he has yet to be fully briefed on the issues, but that based on what he knows so far, he wants answers to two questions: Was confidential information sought or transmitted, and did Williams know that his lawyer was requesting the material for a lawsuit?

If the answer to either of those questions is yes, Fisher said he would be concerned about the propriety of Williams’ intervention. If not, Fisher said, there may be no violation of policy.

“If the chief was misled [by Lomax] about why she wanted this material, that’s important information,” Fisher said.