LAPD Link to Spy Case Investigated : Law enforcement: Inquiry focuses on whether officers gave confidential information to the Anti-Defamation League, police chief says.

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating allegations that one or more officers compiled confidential information about citizens and turned it over to the Anti-Defamation League, Police Chief Willie L. Williams announced Tuesday.

“The allegations were taken very seriously,” Williams said during a meeting of the Los Angeles Police Commission. “An investigation was begun immediately. The results of the investigation, when it is completed, will be made public.”

Police Commission President Jesse A. Brewer echoed Williams’ comments, and members of an Arab-American group who have pressed the department for action on the charges said they were cautiously gratified by the promise of action.

“This is the first time that we’ve heard from the commission that there is an investigation,” said Nazih Bayda, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “That’s a start, but we will follow it up.”

The disclosures Tuesday mark the first time that the LAPD has publicly acknowledged that it is probing charges that at least one officer within the department may have turned over confidential information to the Anti-Defamation League or to an investigator who worked for that group. Those charges grow out of an investigation in San Francisco that has raised questions statewide about the ADL’s relationship to law enforcement agencies.

The district attorney’s office in San Francisco is investigating whether ADL officials violated state law by collecting confidential information on more than 1,000 political activists and private citizens.

The ADL denies any wrongdoing, and officials at its San Francisco and Los Angeles offices have cooperated with the inquiry and with police who searched their offices with warrants. Nevertheless, the allegations have outraged some groups, which feel privacy rights may be violated by collaboration between law enforcement agencies and the ADL.

Roy Bullock, the West Coast investigator for the ADL, has said that he infiltrated about 30 political groups, but he denies doing anything dishonest. Bullock admitted receiving driver’s license and criminal history information on about 50 people, and police found other confidential data in Bullock’s computer. That information is supposed to be available only to law enforcement officials.

Earlier this year, San Francisco Dist. Atty. Arlo Smith said that a portion of the confidential information appeared to come from the LAPD. Los Angeles police officials have refused to comment on the progress of the inquiry, and neither Williams nor Brewer offered any details about the status of the investigation.

Citing news reports and other sources, Bayda said that as many as four LAPD officers may have supplied the ADL with confidential files. Some sources said an LAPD anti-terrorism expert is a possible suspect, but department officials have not confirmed that.

In his appearance before the Police Commission, Bayda was joined by two prominent political figures, former City Councilman Robert Farrell and former Congressman Mervyn M. Dymally.

Farrell said he was particularly distressed by the suggestion that some of the information allegedly turned over to Bullock or the ADL could have made its way to the South African government. Bullock has admitted selling some information to South Africa.

As a councilman, Farrell said he held a number of meetings to discuss issues with South African dissidents, and he now worries that those meetings might have been infiltrated.

“I would hate to know, at some point in the future, that someone was reporting information to the LAPD and that information was part of the material that was sold to South African agents,” Farrell said.

Dymally also urged the department to investigate the charges, saying that they “undermine the confidence-building that the commission has embarked upon with considerable success.”

Members of the group that addressed the Police Commission Tuesday said their fears about LAPD surveillance were heightened by what they considered suspicious police conduct at a rally last week. Demonstrators gathered outside the ADL headquarters in Westwood last Tuesday, Bayda said, and he accused the LAPD of sending a plainclothes photographer to take pictures of protesters.

Bayda said demonstrators knew the photographer was a police officer because they had seen him earlier in the day riding in a car with uniformed LAPD officers.