It's been 10 years since Paul Walters suffered a surprising upset in the Orange County sheriff's election, falling six percentage points behind Michael S. Carona, who, as the county's marshal, was barely on the political landscape.

The loss stung. It also launched the Sheriff's Department on a tumultuous course of scandal, including Carona's October indictment on federal corruption charges.

Walters quietly returned to his job as chief of the Santa Ana Police Department, where he remained largely out of the public eye. He never ran for sheriff again.

"It hurt for a while. I tried to do everything I could to let it pass," he said.

After Carona was indicted, some of the people who had endorsed Walters in 1998 nudged him again. Today, Walters is one of two finalists the Board of Supervisors is considering as Carona's replacement. The board's decision could come today.

Born in England in 1945, the child of a U.S. Army soldier and an English mother, Walters served in the U.S. Air Force before hiring on as a rookie Santa Ana street cop in 1971. He survived a Molotov-cocktail bombing as a patrolman and rose through the ranks of the department before he was appointed chief in 1988.

Walters has two sons, both law enforcement officers. Gary, 40, is a Los Angeles Police Department lieutenant. Michael, 29, is an Orange County sheriff's deputy.

Walters was an early advocate of community policing, assigning officers to work closely with residents to address neighborhood crime. In recent years, his department has used technology to track neighborhood crime trends and identify hot spots that officers track on computer-generated maps.

Santa Ana also operates the largest city jail in Orange County, with a capacity of nearly 500 inmates, most of them federal prisoners held under a contract with the city. Although the jail is about one-tenth the size of the Orange County jails that the sheriff operates, Walters' experience operating the jail has impressed some county officials.

He is an advocate of direct-supervision jails, in which guards are stationed permanently in barracks with inmates. In most Orange County sheriff's jail barracks, guards monitor inmates from the safety of glass-enclosed booths. Guards leave those booths twice an hour to walk through the barracks and check on inmates.