A Web of Hostility

It began as something far below the radar screens of high-ranking Los Angeles County officials: an informal and wholly unscientific online computer “survey” of views on current events. Within hours, it had become a revolting electronic rant of hate against female sheriff’s deputies.

Squarely in the middle of it sits the Assn. for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, the union representing the deputies. Its claim of ignorance of Internet etiquette is unconvincing. It owes its female members a deep apology at the very least for erecting an electronic link from the union’s own Web site to the offensive messages.

Begin with a private company, Digital City, that bills itself as the nation’s largest locally focused online computer network, serving 60 cities including Los Angeles. One of its reader events is to pick a news item and invite online comments. A recent such news item was L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca’s proposal, since recanted, to assign more women to patrol duties over equally or more qualified men.

What followed was a Neanderthal event involving hostile, profane and grotesquely sexual electronic postings from people purporting to be male deputies. That’s where the union representing rank-and-file deputies stepped boldly into the garbage, constructing the link on the union Web site that directed its members to the site containing this noxious “debate.”

What’s the problem, asks the union, which did not send representatives to field questions from outraged county supervisors at a board meeting Tuesday. The union did not post any of the offensive comments on the union Web page; it only provided a link, with a disclaimer that the comments did not represent the union’s beliefs.

Not good enough. When an organization’s Web site invites visitors to try an online link to another page, it must do so with great care. The union was inviting members to view largely anonymous diatribes that were every bit as disgusting as the LAPD’s old “gorillas in the mist” radio transcripts about African American suspects.

The union has since removed the Web link. Meanwhile, the deputies’ online messages reveal much about attitudes in the department toward women.

Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke and Gloria Molina have rightly demanded an investigation and a report on allegations of sexism and racism in the department. Apparently, there is much that deserves scrutiny.