Within two hours after they had beaten a man to death, Kern County sheriff deputies realized their actions had been video recorded, so they tracked down the witnesses to an apartment and barged in, terrorizing them for hours until they handed over their cell phones.

It was 2 a.m. on a Wednesday and the deputies were not going to leave nor were they going to allow anybody else to leave until they had confiscated the cameras that had recorded them beating a 33-year-old father of four after he had been found sleeping on someone’s front lawn last May....