Several members of the Metro Drug Unit, which is disbanding at the end of the month, have filed a complaint against the Anchorage Police Department alleging in part that the unit is being dismantled because of racial discrimination, according to a city spokeswoman and a leader of a police relations task force.

The officers met with the director of the city Office of Equal Opportunity on Thursday to discuss their concerns and the city agency initiated an investigation, city spokeswoman Sarah Erkmann said. "Basically, it's just issues of racial discrimination, that's what they're alleging," she said.

Through a spokeswoman, Acting Police Chief Steve Smith, who has been in his current role only a few weeks, said he had not yet heard about any complaints filed by Friday evening. "He says if there's a grievance out there, we're going to let it take its course and review it," police spokeswoman Anita Shell said.

The Rev. William Greene, chairman of the Anchorage Community Police Relations Task Force and former president of the local NAACP, said most of the officers in the unit have come to him with their concerns about racial discrimination.

"That's one of the most diverse units in APD, and they have done everything that they possibly could to discredit that unit," he said. "These officers are not being treated equally. They are being treated like second-class citizens. ... I think disbanding is a form of intimidation."

Police dispute that race played a role in the decision to disband the unit, which will shut down Sept. 30. Earlier in the week, Smith said in an interview that the move will let APD avoid duplicating the efforts of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which targets high-level drug operations and with whom the unit works closely. Those investigations take months, sometimes years, to complete.

None of the roughly eight people in the unit is being laid off, just redeployed, police Lt. Dave Parker said. And three of them will continue working with the DEA. The others will be put into other units, including vice, which investigates street-level drug, gambling and prostitution crimes.

"They've been considering it for quite a while," Parker said. "It seems that to have two organizations mainly going after the high-level dope in town is not as effective for dealing with drugs in the neighborhoods as is having a group that very actively pursues crack houses and things like that."

But Greene said he thinks some leadership at APD didn't like a unit made up mostly of minorities and wanted to spread them out into "Caucasian units."

Officials in the police department, whom Greene declined to name, have repeatedly threatened to shut the unit down because of underperformance, though many of the officers have been officially recognized for their work, he said.

The officers have not been adequately trained and have been skipped over for promotions, he said. They have been followed around by white officers scrutinizing their work and some haven't gotten performance reviews in years, Greene said.