Paying the Price

If I advertise this as the tale of an epic battle over millions of dollars, of a bridal shower gone bad and of lawmen gone worse, you might perk right up and keep reading.

So that’s the way I’ll tell it.

Because if I said it was about bond issues and contract obligations and liabilities, you might turn the page to check out the diving conditions off La Jolla. Heck, I might, too.

In truth, this is about both. Because money always engenders passions, it is always worth reading about. Especially public money, which this is: $15,919,161 of it, a judgment levied by a jury and upheld by the courts as the price of excess: 28 Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies swarming a 1989 bridal shower for a Samoan family in Cerritos.

It is the largest bill ever delivered to an American law enforcement agency for excesses of force, and it does not include the lawyers’ take or interest, clicking away through the appeals at 10% a year, putting the price tag at a fat, prime $23 million.

Now, some 40 small cities throughout Los Angeles County, which contract with the Sheriff’s Department for law enforcement services, are about to find out how much of that $23 million they’ll have to pay.

Their leaders may find it requires quite an exercise in pretzel logic to explain to their residents that because 10 years ago deputies took some vicious whacks at the sister of the bride (a pro wrestler stage-named Mt. Fiji), that’s why the potholes can’t get filled, or the trees in the parks won’t get trimmed, or the library now has to close at 5 o’clock instead of 6.

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Cerritos is one among those 40 cities that pays the Sheriff’s Department to be its police force. On Feb. 11, 1989, “force” was the operative word. Deputies answering calls about a wild melee at a bridal shower made it even wilder. People got kicked, whacked, messed up and knocked about. People sued.

A jury awarded $15,919,161 to 36 party-goers and party-givers. The county appealed. Court after court--and now the state Supreme Court--advised Los Angeles County to shut up and pay the money.

So now the county has taken the extraordinary step of floating 20-year bonds to pay a court judgment.

The county is issuing the bonds, all right. But then it can turn around and recover the money from each of those 40 cities.

When those small cities hire the sheriff’s deputies, they agree to become legally responsible when deputies screw up on their turf. To cover these little embarrassments, each city kicks something every year into a kitty called the Contract Cities Liability Trust Fund.

But $23 million. Even at $2 million a year, it’s more than the trust fund kitty can afford. Divide the $2-million annual ante among those cities by a formula based on how much each city uses the sheriff’s services, and it could still could gnaw a big hunk out of some little town’s budget.

Ken Brown serves as attorney for some contract cities, among them Cerritos. This is, he says, “a hard pill to force cities to swallow . . . for the next 20 years you have to allocate X-thousand dollars to pay a debt which means you can’t have this park built or give raises to these employees . . . so we say it’s a damn expensive lesson.”

Naturally there’s muttering and grousing: Why is it that cities which have no say-so in hiring or training or supervising or disciplining deputies are on the hook when the deputies run amok?

La Mirada is already looking into hiring Whittier cops to take over La Mirada patrols. City Manager Gary Sloan, in liberty-or-death tones, declaims, “We will not sign an assumption of liability agreement where the community of La Mirada is responsible for what L.A. County deputies do in Palmdale and Lomita and Lancaster. It just doesn’t make sense.”

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The county has weathered home-rule hissy-fits before. Its arguments are soothing: Consider how expensive your own cops, pensions and training would be. Then think of the county’s economies of scale. And when you share the gain, you have to share the pain.

And that was the old Sheriff’s Department, they would add. You wouldn’t recognize the force now. That $23 million? An anomaly. History.

It may not be enough to stem defections, and already cities intending to stay at the table want to be dealt a new hand: a bigger say-so in reviewing and administering claims, and maybe a separate joint-powers authority do so.

Did you read this far?

Bravo. To spare you the trouble of turning the page, diving conditions in La Jolla Cove are excellent.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com