30 Apply for Job as Chief of Police : LAPD: Application period is expected to be closed next week. Two citizen panels will then begin winnowing the field of candidates.

City officials say about 30 people have applied for the job of Los Angeles’ next police chief--two-thirds of them from agencies other than the Los Angeles Police Department.

The city’s Civil Service Commission is expected to announce today that the application period will be closed next week.

“We’ve received sufficient applications,” said Philip Henning Jr., assistant general manager of the city’s Personnel Department.

Also next week, the first of two citizen panels that will screen candidates is expected to be named by the commission. The panel of seven civic leaders will review applications and reduce the field to 10 or 15.

The names of candidates seeking to succeed Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, who has said he will retire in April, are being withheld. Personnel officials say they have promised job applicants confidentiality and will release their names only if they become finalists.

Although 25 LAPD officers are of high enough rank to apply, the head of the department’s Command Officers Assn., Capt. Charles Labrow, said he expects fewer than a dozen to do so.

Police Department sources, speaking on the condition they not be named, said they believe assistant chiefs Robert Vernon and David Dotson have applied, or will soon. The sources said that deputy chiefs Bernard Parks, Mark Kroeker and Glenn Levant have also applied, along with Cmdr. Robert Gil. The sources said they expect Deputy Chief Matthew Hunt and Cmdr. Art Lopez to become candidates.

A second citizen panel, appointed by the Civil Service Commission, will administer an oral examination to semifinalists, probably in February, and narrow the field to six finalists, one of whom will be selected by the Police Commission.

Candidates from within the department have a one-point scoring advantage over outsiders under City Charter rules, which require that an outside contender also will have to outscore all insiders.

In a bid to attract outside candidates, personnel officials have approached chiefs in other cities.

City Councilman Marvin Braude, chairman of the council’s Public Safety Committee, said he attended meetings between personnel officials and six outside chiefs at a police convention two months ago.

He said he believes the scoring advantage for insiders is “not a significant handicap . . . for a meritorious” outsider. “My role,” he said, “was to reassure them that it was our intent to be evenhanded . . . and that the old days were no longer where there would be a 10 or more point advantage to insiders.”

Braude would not identify the chiefs, citing their concerns that their applications remain confidential.