Minority Groups, Police Chiefs Plan Panel on Relations : Racial tensions: Top officials of 47 departments and community representatives will name delegates to board. Handling of abuse complaints leads their agenda.

A summit of various Los Angeles County police chiefs and Latino, black and Asian community representatives produced an agreement Saturday to form a permanent working group to tackle issues aggravating police-minority relations in Los Angeles and surrounding cities.

The agreement was the result of a two-day conference in San Pedro of police officials and minority leaders. The unusual session was convened by the Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department of Justice as part of its effort to ease racial tensions in the wake of the March 3 Los Angeles police beating of Rodney G. King.

At a Saturday afternoon news conference, spokesmen for each of the minorities and the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Assn. said the meeting had produced a consensus that some better means must be found for responding to complaints of police misconduct. In particular, they said a process is needed to inform complainants what disciplinary steps, if any, are taken against accused officers.

But the spokesmen said the dozen police chiefs, joined by several lesser-ranking representatives of the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, objected to proposals from minority representatives for formal citizen police oversight groups to monitor police conduct and procedures.

Although comparatively few details about the two days of discussions were revealed at the news conference, both Justice Department and minority representatives expressed delight that a significant delegation of police chiefs had expressed willingness for the first time to meet on a continuing basis with the minority representatives.

“We established the ground rules by which we can work,” said Norm Curry of the Santa Monica chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. “They (the police chiefs) have agreed to play. That is a tremendous step forward.”

“In two days, you can’t expect to move mountains,” said Vermont McKinney, a Community Relations Service aide, “but this was a successful first step.”

Alhambra Police Chief Russell Siverling said the Los Angeles County Police Chiefs Assn. would meet Friday to designate which five of the county’s 47 police chiefs would represent the chiefs in the new working group, which as yet is unnamed.

Meanwhile, the NAACP, the Hispanic Advisory Council to the Los Angeles Police Commission and the Asian Pacific Planning Council will each designate five representatives on the working panel.

Julian Klugman, Western regional director for the federal Community Relations Service, said he and other Justice Department aides will continue to promote the discussions, which may take place on a monthly basis.

Siverling said that while it remains “a little bit vague, quite honestly” how the working group will proceed, it struck him as “remarkable how many areas we did agree about.”

The Alhambra chief said, for example, that many police chiefs would like to be able to inform complainants precisely what happened as a result of investigations into their complaints, but current state law sharply restricts what police departments can say.

It could be, he suggested, that as a result of future discussions the chiefs might agree to join minority representatives in lobbying to change the law to allow fuller explanations.

Ed Herrera, chairman of the Hispanic Advisory Council, said many chiefs also had expressed understanding of Latino representatives’ concerns that police not hasten deportations by reporting their investigations to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Leading the group’s 13-point agenda are ways to handle complaints of police misconduct and ways to curtail excessive use of force, Herrera said.

Other points to be discussed, he said, include recruitment of new police officers, training, communications between police and minorities, joint police-community education, discriminatory practices, youth-police relations, language and cultural problems, police accountability and selective law enforcement.