Deputy Charged in False Arrest Case : Law enforcement: Sheriff’s Department internal investigation developed after a Latino suspect made allegations against an Anglo officer.

A case in which a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy is accused of attempting to frame a habitual criminal underscores an increasingly aggressive approach by the Sheriff’s Department against its own officers for wrongdoing, including those instances in which racial prejudice may be a factor.

Deputy Scott Robert Wolf, 25, could face up to three years in prison if he is convicted of the felony charge of falsely accusing Phillip de Spain, 32, of Walnut Park of attempting to steal a van.

Since the July 15, 1992, arrest, De Spain has been convicted of another offense, possession of cocaine, and sent to state prison. He has, by his own count, been in jail at least a dozen times, first being taken into custody when he was only 6 years old. He calls himself incorrigible.

But he says, and a Sheriff’s Department investigation concurred, that he did not try to steal the van.

In an interview at the state’s Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, De Spain said that he was picked up by Wolf while walking with a friend down a Walnut Park street at 4 a.m. De Spain said Wolf’s attitude changed when, while answering questions, De Spain he told Wolf that he had previously assaulted two deputies from Wolf’s Firestone station.

Wolf immediately said, “You really haven’t gotten anything coming,” De Spain recalled. Later, he added, when he asked the deputy why he was writing up a false arrest report on him, Wolf’s response was that he was “white” and De Spain was “Mexican.”

Now that the charge against him has been dismissed and the deputy charged instead, De Spain said he intends to sue the Sheriff’s Department. He repeatedly asked a reporter where he could find a lawyer who would take the case.

Carole Freeman, the sheriff’s captain who commands the Lynwood and Firestone stations, said the investigation conducted by the department and the charges subsequently brought against Wolf show that “we’re interested in the rights of even those people who want to sue us.”

De Spain and Capt. Gary Vance, commander of the Sheriff’s Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau, credited Lt. Mark Milburn, then a watch commander at the Firestone station, with initiating the inquiry after he happened to hear De Spain complaining about being treated unfairly as he was brought into the station.

“The next day, he came and got me out of my cell and talked to me, taping what I said on three cassettes,” De Spain said.

Milburn, contacted at Central Jail, where he now has administrative responsibilities, said: “My inquiry led me to believe things might not have been done properly. . . . We would do the same thing with any complaint.”

There were other witnesses to the arrest, including a companion who was walking with De Spain, and four other deputies summoned to the scene as backups.

De Spain’s public defender said he had been told that the Sheriff’s Department was conducting a sting operation against Wolf because of other complaints against him.

Fred Brennan, now a supervisor in the public defender’s office, said in an interview that he was told by the district attorney’s office that sheriff’s supervisors “had suspected this guy, Wolf, of staging other false arrests as part of a group of rogue officers out on their own making fake arrests.”

Brennan said that within a few weeks of the arrest, the district attorney asked the court to dismiss the van theft charge against De Spain.

Vance, the commander of the sheriff’s investigations unit, however, denied that Wolf had been the subject of a sting operation.

“I’m not saying we don’t do such stings, but it wasn’t done here,” Vance said. “In this case, Milburn smelled a rat. He did a little checking, didn’t like what he was hearing, and we were requested to take on the investigation.

“Any allegation of criminal activity on the part of departmental employees falls under our bailiwick,” Vance said. “We do a very unbiased investigation and we kind of let the chips fall where they may. The findings go right from me to the district attorney.”

The case against Wolf is being handled in the district attorney’s office by Terry White, who was the prosecutor in the Rodney G. King trial in Simi Valley and has been involved in other prosecutions involving racially based misconduct by officers.

Wolf’s lawyer, Richard Shinee of the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, said his client would have no comment on the case.