Hiring of Stripper for Deputy Investigated : Inquiry: Incident at Orange County training academy comes to light after TV show acquires videotape of performance. School’s leader says he expects to be disciplined.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department has opened an internal investigation into the hiring of a stripper who performed at a birthday party two years ago at a department training academy facility in Garden Grove, authorities said Wednesday.

The academy’s top officer, Lt. Steve Carroll, said Wednesday that he expects to face unspecified disciplinary action for allowing the stripper to perform before a class of training officers and recruits. Other top academy officials also will be sanctioned, said Assistant Sheriff Walt Fath.

About 30 trainees and 10 training officers attended the April 15, 1991, birthday celebration for an instructor. The party was held during the work day in an office of the Garden Grove facility, which is no longer in use, officials said.

Sheriff’s Department officials said they learned of the incident only last Friday when they were approached by a television reporter who had a videotape of the 10-minute performance. The officials said they did not know why they had not heard about the incident earlier.

“If it was rumored to have happened, it never reached here, and I don’t know why,” said Assistant Sheriff Dennis LaDucer, who oversees department operations.

The Sheriff’s Department announcement came a day before a scheduled airing of the videotape on “A Current Affair,” a nationally televised tabloid news show.

On the tape, the unidentified dancer is shown beginning the performance wearing a police uniform but stripping to a bikini top and G-string.

On Friday, high-ranking sheriff’s deputies ordered an internal affairs investigation to determine whether department policies were violated, LaDucer said.

Mike Watkiss, Los Angeles bureau chief for “A Current Affair,” said the investigation apparently was ordered within an hour after he confronted Carroll with the videotape, obtained by the TV show about two months ago.

“The point is we don’t want to have sexually explicit dancing in county facilities. That’s not appropriate,” LaDucer said.

In the tape, the dancer is seen coaxing the training officer to pull lollipops from her top and the front of her G-string with his teeth.

At other times, she is shown straddling the officer’s head and pushing his face into her breasts as dozens of academy recruits and instructors, including Carroll, watch.

“We would have expected that the supervisors and manager of the academy would have taken a more professional, businesslike approach to the celebration of the birthday,” Fath said in a prepared statement. “We are embarrassed by it and we will develop steps to see that it does not happen again.”

One training officer, who asked not to be identified, said the show was a thank-you gesture to the training officer for his dedicated work. But he admitted that the display showed “poor judgment.”

Sheriff Brad Gates could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Sheriff’s officials declined to say how many from the academy--whose graduates go on to become officers in Orange County and elsewhere--could face discipline. “At this point in time the sheriff is more concerned about who was in that decision-making process,” LaDucer said. “We don’t (hold) new recruits to the same standards that we are going to hold supervisors.”

Times staff writer Nancy Wride contributed to this story.