Lawsuit Seeks Restrictions on Deputy’s Tasks : Law: Complaint accuses Sheriff’s Department of allowing Robert Bishop to run roughshod over citizens, despite seven-year history of allegations of brutality, false arrests.

San Diego County Sheriff’s Deputy Robert Bishop has been accused before.

Of battering a former Navy chaplain, which resulted in a $1.1-million jury verdict. Of assaulting two men at the Rincon Indian Reservation, a case the county settled for $25,000. Of using a flashlight to smack a camper to whom a jury eventually awarded $12,500.

And now, Bishop is accused of falsely arresting, choking and beating a Vietnam veteran in a case that has already meant a $50,000 county payout to another man involved in the same incident.

In the latest lawsuit, filed Friday, attorney Tom Adler has requested that the court keep Bishop from ever working outside an office again.

“It gets to the point where you have to ask the court to intervene because nothing is being done against this guy,” he said. “This is a petition asking the court to do what the Sheriff’s Department should be doing.”

The lawsuit accuses Sheriff Jim Roache and former Sheriff John Duffy of allowing Bishop, 35, a 12-year deputy, to “run roughshod over the citizens of San Diego County” despite a seven-year history of complaints. The suit, filed in Vista Superior Court, also seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Bishop, the suit says, “has demonstrated a pervasive pattern of falsely arresting, detaining and assaulting citizens of San Diego County . . . allowing a dangerous public nuisance . . . to exist.”

Roache said he and the county cannot be held liable for any possible “dereliction of duty,” and declined to talk about Bishop, other than to say he is now assigned to the sheriff’s transportation detail.

“His supervisors say his evaluations have been acceptable,” Roache said.

Bishop was transferred from his job as a patrol deputy in Valley Center last March to an assignment transporting prisoners to and from the Vista jail. Before his Valley Center job, Bishop patrolled in Vista and worked in the Vista jail.

Complaints against Bishop started in early 1983, the suit contends, when the deputy allegedly yanked a man out of his car and snatched his wallet out of his hands. The man, Mark Smith, complained to the Sheriff’s Department but nothing was ever done, according to the suit.

Later this year, Bishop allegedly choked and twisted the arm of Alonso Sanchez Contreras after Sanchez was asked for identification. Charges against Sanchez, who was arrested for resisting arrest and suspicion of being drunk in public, were later dismissed. The suit says the Sheriff’s Department did nothing when Sanchez complained.

Last year, a Superior Court jury awarded $1.1 million to former Navy chaplain Jim Butler, then 60, who was arrested after deputies said he interfered with their investigation of a 1985 car accident that occurred in front of Butler’s home.

Butler contended that Bishop and another deputy who pinned him to the ground broke his nose, dislocated his shoulder and left him with neck and back spasms.

A camper on Palomar Mountain complained that Bishop applied a painful neck hold and arrested him for allegedly interfering with police work during Labor Day weekend of 1987. Thomas Booze, the camper, said Bishop wrestled him to the ground and knocked him unconscious. A jury awarded Booze $12,500.

Two men said Bishop assaulted them at the Rincon Indian Reservation on New Year’s Day, 1988. An arbitrator awarded Nick and Joe Herrera $50,000 but the case eventually was settled for $25,000.

About a year ago, Bishop and Deputy Dan Cripe responded to a 911 call from the wife of Richard Ross, who said her husband, a Vietnam veteran, had a wartime flashback and was threatening her with a rifle in their trailer. Armando Mendoza, a neighbor, had calmed Ross by the time the deputies arrived.

The deputies arrested both men, allegedly choking and beating Mendoza, who settled for $50,000 from taxpayers. In his lawsuit against the county, Roache, Duffy and the deputies, Ross contends that Bishop and Cripe handcuffed, assaulted and arrested him. A jury acquitted Ross last April on charges of battery against a police officer and resisting arrest.

Adler, the attorney for Ross, said Sheriff’s Department officials could not have picked a more inappropriate job for Bishop than to transport prisoners.

“Now he’s more of a danger,” Adler said. “He’s got a captive audience of people who are handcuffed. He should be behind a computer screen or counting beans or something.”

Department officials said privately Friday that Bishop had been transferred from patrol as punishment for too many questionable incidents.

Nate Northup, a county attorney who is representing Bishop, said he had not seen the latest lawsuit and had no comment.