Authorities Are Nettled by Reporting About Sting : Journalism: Police and the Ventura County district attorney’s office accuse a newspaper of alerting lawbreakers to a surprise bust.

A Simi Valley newspaper has raised the ire of Ventura County law enforcement authorities who accuse the publication of blowing the surprise of a planned sting operation designed to catch lawbreakers.

The newspaper’s managing editor, however, says at least some of the sting targets had already figured out that they were about to be stung.

According to the Simi Valley Enterprise, police wrote to 100 people telling them they would get free lottery tickets if they appeared today at a local hotel. The story, published in Thursday afternoon’s editions, 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. Among the targets of the sting were people accused of failing to pay child support and people with outstanding felony and misdemeanor warrants, the paper said.

The Ventura County district attorney’s office tried to get the story stopped--first by appealing to the editors and then by asking Superior Court Judge Edwin Osborne for an injunction. Both the editors and Osborne refused to stop the presses.

Noting that the goal of the operation was to arrest suspected criminals, Ventura Dist. Atty. Michael Bradbury said “the local papers have a stake in the community” too. He said he is so angry that from now on neither he nor other members of his office will talk to the Enterprise, a daily newspaper with 17,000 subscribers.

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

But Jaque Kampschroer, 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.”

She said targets of the sting had tipped off the newspaper, saying they were suspicious of the letters they had received promising lottery tickets.

The decision to print was made, she said, after the paper checked with the local lottery office. She said lottery officials told the newspaper they had been deluged with phone calls from people who had received the letters.

The paper decided the sting was no longer a secret and went to press, Kampschroer said.

Kampschroer said the reaction to the decision to print the story has been mixed. Half a dozen people canceled their subscriptions while others criticized the police.

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

Bradbury said that as a result of the unwanted publicity, the sting operation today 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 show up looking for their free tickets.