Cops Who Clean Their Own House

At the very moment the public was recoiling from the first videotape images of the police beating of Rodney King, a case signaling a healthy self-cleansing mechanism within the law enforcement community was making its way toward trial in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Two ex-Orange County sheriff’s deputies and an ex-Maywood police officer, all buddies from prior days, were found guilty of beating a Huntington Park man in his cell last year. They face maximum sentences of three years.

The Maywood case reveals some house-cleaning efforts well before the recent national attention to the King case. The two deputies were dismissed last fall after an investigation by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s internal affairs division. The Maywood officer was fired, too.

The charges stemmed from the beating of a man who was in the Maywood Jail on traffic warrants. The trio had been drinking and celebrating at a bachelor party before stopping by the jail to visit other officers. The prosecution said they posed as district attorney’s investigators, and entered the victim’s cell supposedly in search of a man in a red shirt involved earlier in a chase with another officer.

The three officers were no strangers to controversy: All had been involved in a brawl at the Whisky in Hollywood in 1988, but none was charged with any offense. But the public can take some satisfaction that an instance of excessive force at an area jail was followed with the arrests, dismissals and convictions of out-of-control officers.