Topeka ? City officials are looking into complaints by a Hispanic police organization of racist attitudes within the Topeka Police Department.

What began as an internal affairs investigation in April into “alleged racial insensitivity” has been taken over by the city legal office, Mayor Butch Felker and Police Chief Ed Klumpp said in a news release Friday.

“We are taking these allegations very seriously, and this investigation is being conducted very thoroughly,” Felker and Klumpp said.

Felker and Klumpp noted that all of the allegations were made by police employees and did not involve complaints from the public.

Jose Carlos Miramontes, national president of the National Latino Peace Officers Assn., said the alleged incidents “at a minimum, show a pattern of insensitivity, and at worst, outright racist attitudes on the part of some members of the police department.”

Miramontes, in a letter dated Tuesday, requested a formal investigation into incidents outlined in an April letter written by Maj. Michael Padilla, the highest-ranking Hispanic officer in the Topeka Police Department.

According to Padilla’s letter to the city’s Human Rights Commission, a copy of which was obtained by The Topeka Capital-Journal, officers were offended by incidents in which:

l A detective sent an e-mail to other police officers containing an assumption that an increase in Hispanics in the community would bring an increase in attempts to bribe police.

l Officers said people who live in the United States should learn to speak English.

l During a training session involving the police department and other agencies, a computer-generated slide was shown on an overhead projector that racially insulted an Asian police officer.

l A racially insensitive comment was made about an officer of Middle Eastern descent on Sept. 11.

Padilla told the newspaper on Friday he would not discuss specific incidents because they were being investigated.