FBI Field Commanders to Discuss Bias : Promotion: Director summons 56 top managers to Washington for a meeting on discrimination complaints. Black agents are considering a suit.

WASHINGTON —  In a move that seems designed to head off a lawsuit by black agents, FBI Director William S. Sessions asked his 56 field commanders to meet with him in Washington today to discuss discrimination complaints.

The unusual day-long conference is one of a series of steps that Sessions has taken in the last three weeks since learning that black agents believed they had suffered discrimination and that they were considering filing suit. The agency lost a discrimination suit in 1988 brought by Latino employees.

Sessions and Floyd I. Clarke, the FBI’s deputy director, met April 5 with nearly 250 of the bureau’s 474 black agents and later that day with their lawyers. They are considering filing a class-action suit against the agency, which is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws.

In the earlier question-and-answer session, the agents raised complaints of widespread discrimination inside the nation’s premier law enforcement agency but focused on assignment and promotion practices.

Among other things, they said that they were placed on squads without the opportunity to advance and were held back from high-priority cases or reassigned if a case they were on achieved such status. They also charged that black agents receive discipline disproportionate to that meted out to white agents, face retaliation for complaining and fail to be included on the FBI’s promotion boards.

Sessions told the agents that racial and ethnic discrimination would not be tolerated in the agency and promised to rectify serious mistakes that he acknowledged had been made in the past, according to sources familiar with what took place. In addition, he offered to waive a 30-day limit on filing grievances.

Sessions’ decision to bring the special agents in charge of the FBI’s field offices to headquarters to discuss the complaints “underscores his commitment to doing something about the problem,” said a veteran bureau official. The official, who declined to be identified, said that some of the semiautonomous special agents in charge regard the complaints as unfair and overblown.

But this source said: “It becomes immaterial if the infractions are real or perceived if the (black) agents believe them. And they do.”

The 474 black agents--85 more than when Sessions became director in November, 1987--represent 4.7% of the FBI’s total of 10,010 agents, according to March 31 figures.

In an official statement, Sessions said that he believes it “imperative to solicit the personal input of field managers, have the opportunity to discuss (equal employment opportunity) initiatives under way and attempt to determine what additional steps can be taken to address these vitally important topics.”

David J. Shaffer, the lead attorney retained to investigate the possibility of filing a class-action suit, said that he thinks the summoning of the field commanders “shows that the concerns we raised are very serious and considered legitimate by the director.”

Since taking command of the FBI, Sessions repeatedly has voiced his opposition to racial and ethnic discrimination but has had to wrestle with a number of high-profile incidents that originated before he came to the agency.

Sessions is currently weighing discipline against 11 agents for being involved in actions against Donald Rochon, a black agent who suffered harassment by white agents while he worked in the bureau’s Chicago office in the mid-1980s.