Robert Faturechi

LOS ANGELES -- Long before he made the news for allegedly smuggling a heroin-stuffed burrito behind bars, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Henry Marin was a reality TV star -- of sorts.

In the first episode of Fox's reality show "The Academy," which followed a class of Sheriff's Department recruits, Marin was portrayed as the dim-witted class bumbler.

On the first day, he was caught by his supervisor dozing during orientation.

All it took was a tweet. A famous rapper's Twitter feed posted a phone number for the Compton station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, urging his more than half-million followers to call. Within seconds, every line on every phone at the station was jammed.

Legitimate emergency calls for help were blocked for almost three hours by a deluge of pranksters. Sheriff's official denounced the tweet by The Game as irresponsible. But now authorities are facing a tough question: Should those who send tweets be held liable for the problems their messages cause?

LOS ANGELES -- The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has begun termination proceedings against six deputies who were part of what officials are describing as an aggressive group that may have used gang-like hand signs to identify themselves before allegedly assaulting two fellow deputies at a Christmas party last year.

The firing of six deputies in connection with a single incident is one of the largest in the department's history, officials said.

LOS ANGELES -- Former pro baseball player Lenny Dykstra's housekeeper accused him of sexual assault, according to records, though prosecutors declined to file charges this month citing a lack of evidence.

According to the rejection memo by Los Angeles County prosecutors, a female housekeeper alleged Dykstra would force her to give him oral sex on Saturdays. However, the 41-year-old woman's case seemed to flounder because of an apparent lack of evidence that the activity was forced.

The woman told investigators she "needed the job and the money so she went along with the suspect's requests rather than lose her job," according to the filing, and "returned to work in the suspect's home with knowledge that she obtained from the Internet of a claim of sexual assault by another woman."

LOS ANGELES -- For the first time in more than four decades, Los Angeles is on track to end the year with fewer than 300 killings, a milestone in a steady decline of homicides that has changed the quality of life in many neighborhoods and defied predictions that a bad economy would inexorably lead to higher crime.

As of midafternoon on Sunday, the Los Angeles Police Department had tallied 291 homicides in 2010. The city is likely to record the fewest number of killings since 1967, when its population was almost 30 percent smaller.

Strikingly, homicides in the city have dropped by about one-third since 2007, the last full year before the economic downturn, according to a Los Angeles Times' analysis of coroner records. Throughout the rest of Los Angeles County, which is patrolled by the Sheriff's Department and individual cities' police departments, homicides during the same period tumbled by nearly 40 percent. The Times' analysis showed 159 homicides in areas patrolled by the Sheriff's Department and 164 in the rest of the county through mid-December.

The city's total translates into roughly 7.5 killings per 100,000 people and puts it in league with New York City and Phoenix as having among the lowest homicide rates among major U.S. cities.