PORTLAND – Two women have sued Lewiston Police Chief William Welch for actions they say belittled efforts to curb domestic violence and led to their transfer from assignments at the police station.

Carol Perkins and Michele Swift, both employees of the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project, took their complaint to U.S. District Court, where they are seeking unspecified damages.

Perkins and Swift charge that Welch grabbed their throats and pretended to strangle them while they were posing for a group picture at a 1999 community policing conference in Rockport.

Welch said he was only joking and later apologized to the women, but they allege that his actions show a lack of appreciation of the seriousness of domestic violence and a lack of respect for women.

“That strangling a woman can be considered material for a ‘joke’ . . . illustrates the attitude of the Lewiston Police Department toward female life,” the complaint alleges. “The city’s inaction and Welch’s conduct amounted to deliberate, callous and reckless indifference to the constitutional rights of others.”

Although they are not police employees, Perkins and Welch held jobs that required them to work at the police station in cooperation with police officers. Following the incident, both women were transferred to different jobs within the Abused Women’s Advocacy Project.

According to the complaint, Lewiston police officers regularly referred to the domestic violence workers as “women’s libbers” and “man haters” and even the name of their organization was the subject of jokes.

The complaint alleges that when Welch was asked what AWAP stood for, he waved his hand in a slapping motion and said, “You know, awappa, wappa, wappa . . .”

Perkins and Swift filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission, which found last December that there was merit to their charges.

Welch declined to discuss the lawsuit while it is in court, calling it a “sidebar” to the work being done by the department. “We have been taking some nice strides in this area,” he added, in an apparent reference to a training program that every member of the department has completed over the last year.

Chris Fenno, the advocacy project’s director, agreed that relations between the agency and police have improved.

AWAP helped set up a domestic violence training program for the department that used national experts and involved every member of the department.

“I certainly think that a lot has been done with the department in the last two years,” Fenno said. “We are in a pretty OK place right now.”