D.A., Aides to Boycott Simi Paper Over Story : Journalism: The Ventura County district attorney says he won’t talk to reporters from the Enterprise because it disclosed a planned police sting. The paper defends its action.

Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said Friday that he and his top aides would no longer talk to reporters from a local newspaper because the paper exposed an undercover police sting operation in Simi Valley.

In a memo to his staff, Bradbury said he was taking action against the Enterprise in Simi Valley “due to our loss of confidence and trust” in the paper, which has 17,000 subscribers in eastern Ventura County and which exposed the law enforcement sting in its Thursday afternoon editions.

The paper wrote that 100 people who police were seeking had received letters promising free lottery tickets if they appeared this morning at the Posada Royale Quality Inn. Some recipients alerted the newspaper with questions about the letters. Without quoting police, the story said the letters were a hoax set up to arrest people with outstanding warrants.

“Simi Valley residents are being lured into a police sting operation by the offer of free lottery tickets,” the paper wrote, without citing any source for its information.

When Bradbury learned Thursday that the paper was about to print the story, he said, he pleaded with editors to hold off. Authorities also asked Ventura County Superior Court Judge Edwin M. Osborne for an injunction blocking publication but were refused.

In an interview Friday, Bradbury criticized the paper for publicizing the police operation. “In my 23 years” as a prosecutor, “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said.

Noting that the goal of the operation was to arrest suspected criminals, Bradbury said “the local papers have a stake in the community” too. Among the sting’s targets were people accused of failing to pay child support and people with outstanding felony arrest warrants, the paper said.

“It’s hard to understand why they would not cooperate,” Simi Valley Police Chief Paul Miller said. “They’ve hurt the community, because there’s a lot of child molesters and burglars running around out there” that police might have caught.

Bradbury said as a result of the unwanted publicity the operation this morning at the hotel will be scaled back. “We will have a skeleton crew there,” he said, in case some of the people wanted by police did not read the newspaper story and show up looking for their free tickets.

Promising lottery tickets and prizes to people who appear at a central location has been used from time to time by police nationwide as an inexpensive way to apprehend suspected criminals. After those who respond to the lottery ticket offer check into the hotel or convention center used to stage the event, everyone is arrested.

Jaque Kampschroer, the managing editor of the paper, said she and other editors decided to print the story “because we thought we were doing the right thing for the people of Simi Valley.”

“We anguished over the decision,” she said. The editors asked themselves, “Do we blow a police operation?”

The decision to print was made, she said, after the paper checked with local lottery officials. They were told that the lottery office in Ventura had been deluged by phone calls from people who had received the letters and, after becoming suspicious, checked to find out whether the offer was real.

Officials were telling the callers that they knew nothing about the Simi Valley offer, according to a lottery spokeswoman in Ventura.

The paper decided that the sting was no longer a secret and published the story, Kampschroer said. Kampschroer said she realized that the paper might endanger its relationship with prosecutors.

In the wake of the story, Bradbury met with five top advisers Friday to discuss a future course of action in regard to the Enterprise. He said he and the others had decided not to talk to representatives of the paper any longer, but left it up to individual attorneys whether they wanted to follow his lead.

“You should be very cautious in your dealings with them, however, since they have demonstrated a lack of concern for the interests we serve,” he said.

Kampschroer said the reaction to the decision to print the story has been mixed. A half-dozen people canceled their subscriptions to the paper, while others criticized the police.

“I still think we made the right decision,” she said.

Bill Woestendiek, director of the School of Journalism at USC, said that what the newspaper did fell into a “gray area” of journalism ethics.

But he was critical of the deceptiveness of the police operation. “If they have the names and addresses of 3,000 criminals, they ought to go out and arrest them,” he said.