Before the passage of SB 1070 the battles raging in Arizona often centered around the tactics of Mariocpa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, or Evil Arpaio as we like to call him. Arizona is a place where immigrants are pried from the arms of their children after minor traffic stops. To ea
se the pain Maricopa County Sheriffs carry toys and stuffed animals in their cars to calm the nerves of children whose worst nightmares have become a reality. Once in detention, suspected undocumented immigrants are denied bail, public defenders and are placed in Evil Arpaio’s tent city.
Immigrant inmates at Tent City are served rotting bologna sandwiches and routinely denied basic services such as medical treatment, mail and visitation. In the past several years Evil Arpaio has been sued 3,000 times causing insurance premiums for the MCSO to skyrocket and the costs of the lost suits to the County further exacerbates a State and County Budget that is absurdly out of whack.
Despite the loss of major law suits, international pressure and a federal investigation Arpaio maintains his cruelly and belligerently targeting of immigrant communities. Arpaio conducts midnight raids with his over budget and useless immigrant sweeps where ski masked swat teams with helicopter support and his all White “volunteer posse” indiscriminately target Latino work places and communities. The effects are horrible and the impact on children is unbearably inhuman to any witness.
Arpaio is a symbolic and central figure in the hatred occurring in Arizona. Evil Arpaio has used Immigrants as a scapegoat to deflect attention away from his incompetence as a law enforcement official. Arpaio has used his power to create a laboratory of hatred where national networks of anti-immigrant organizations and white supremacist (see Los Haters) help Arpaio craft and implement new laws, strategies, and tactics to target and remove immigrants, and because. Arpaio is an eager lightening rod on immigrant enforcement and belligerently and cruelly engages in outrageous and horrendous persecution of immigrants.
Evil Arpaio was first elected Sheriff of Maricopa County in 1992. From the beginning Evil Arpaio basically sucked as a Sheriff. To hide his incompetence Evil Arpaio engaged in diversion tactics that both served his lust for media attention and projected an image as ‘tough on crime.’
Early on Evil Arpaio implemented policies and programs to draw media attention as crime rose. In 1995 Arpaio re-instituted Chain Gangs for County inmates under his confinement. Soon after Arpaio began to issue pink underwear in an effort to humiliate inmates. Arpaio also instituted a “Volunteer Posse” that took in armed citizen crime fighters including known skin heads and racis
ts. While these programs did nothing to reduce crime or recidivism the programs did give Arpaio a deserved image as ‘tough,’ which is different than effective.
“America’s Toughest Sheriff,” is actually America’s worst sheriff: In July of 2008 the East Valley Tribune, a local Arizona daily newspaper, printed a pulitzer prize winning five part series, Reasonable Doubt on Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office. This series won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. The damning report was later echoed by a similar report by the conservative Goldwater Institute called Mission Unaccomplished. These reports show a Sheriff’s department rife with fiscal mismanagement, misuse of funds, abuse of power, racism, and incompetence in protecting the public. The Sheriff is also under a forever taking too long Federal Investigation.
Here is a samplings of the findings of the East Tribune Report.
- People wait longer for deputies to arrive at life-threatening emergencies. Detectives make arrests in far fewer criminal investigations. Patrol cars arrived late 2.3 of the time on more than 6,000 of the most serious calls for service. Instead, taxpayers are spending millions of dollars to enforce federal immigration laws. While the Maricopa county board of supervisors has set a 5 minute deputy response time for priority 1 calls the sheriff’s department has has failed to meet this mark 55% of the time. In 2006 sheriff deputies arrived late to over 3,000 calls.
- From 2005 to 2008 arrests in rates in criminal investigations went down from 10.5% to 2.5%.
- In El Mirage Sheriff deputies did little or no investigation on at least 30 violent crimes, including a dozen reported sexual assaults during 2006 and 07. This led to cities like El Mirage to fire the Sheriff’s department and instead form their own police department. However, when sex crime cases were turned over to the new police department from the sheriff nearly 70 of those cases had little or no investigative work done and the newspaper reported 12 sex crimes and 20 robberies had little or no investigation done at all.
- Arpaio uses a human smuggling law to go after immigrants using deputies, helicopters, the swat team and police dogs. As the East Tribune reported. “The sheriff’s office conducts large-scale operations without any evidence of criminal activity.” Many of these sweeps in Latino communities are done without any evidence of criminal activity, violating federal regulations intended to prevent racial profiling.
How does the sheriff’s department get away with such a horrible record? One reason is the miss-classification of investigations. The MCSO classifies an extraordinary amount of cases as “exceptionally cleared.” The MCSO detectives closed three times as many cases as exceptionally cleared than they did with actual arrests. Why? Rampant overtime spending on immigration operations has driven the agency into financial crisis and forced it to close 3 facilities in Maricopa County.
Laboratory of Hate
Evil Arpaio’s tactics consist of local law enforcement implementation of two doctrines Inherent Authority and Enforcement Through Attrition (See Los Haters). Evil Arpaio has used what he called “saturation patrols” and “crime sweeps” to illegally target communities of color and immigrants. These efforts ignore federal guidelines that require reliable crime statistics and information and instead racia
lly profile communities that are then targeted for mostly minor traffic offenses. These ‘traffic offenses’ serve as a pretext to detain immigrants who are then checked for proof of residency or citizenship. Anyone pulled over by Evil Arpaio’s Sheriffs not having proof of ‘legal’ status are then arrested. This puts immigrants into a complicated legal maze that most often results in deportation.
These tactics have resulted in multiple law suits for racial profiling and discrimination as well as a Department of Justice investigation.
Once in detention Evil Arpaio uses federal funds and his own abuse of power to maintain perhaps the most inhumane jail system in America. Arpaio attempts to humiliate inmates by providing them with pink socks and underwear and parading them through public streets in chain gangs. Evil Arpaio’s jail abuses also includes incarcerating immigrants and others in open air tents in the desert where temperatures reach above 120 degrees. Arpaio’s medical facilities are inadequate and have resulted in de-certification. Arpaio also boasts of feeding inmates rotted bologna sandwiches and daily meals of $.15. Pregnant detainees are forced to give birth handcuffed and chained to a gurney. These abuses are articulated in two letters from inmates, Letter from Durango Jail and Letter from Estrella jail.
These policies and tactics represent a strategic effort on the part of national immigrant haters who want to design program for mass deportation that is acceptable to the mass public. Individual traffic stops seem mundane, but the effects on children left behind, families separated and all that immigrants leave behind and lose are devastating.
To justify Evil Arpiao’s fanatical and warlike persecution of immigrants Arpaio and far right wing extremist activists and politicians like State Senator Russell Pearce have demonized the immigrant community by inaccurately painted undocumented immigrants as criminals, drug smugglers and public burdens.
Arpaio Hates like no Other
Evil Arpaio is a classic bigot with an itch to express his true feelings. Evil Arpaio’s feelings are just that – evil. Sheriff Joe “Evil” Arpaio has said on national television it is an honor to be compared to the Ku Klux Klan.
Arpaio is central to the plan put into motion by Los Haters. Evil Apraio’s belligerent and fanatical persecution of enforcement is designed to desensitize Americans to cruel immigrant abuse. This is Attrition Through Enforcement at its deadliest. Apraio is getting away with so much abuse because angry White Arizonans are ok with it. However, Arpaio’s behavior and tactics we feel are immoral and illegal and must be stopped.
Evil Arpaio has also proudly compared his “Tent City” jails to concentration camps. Evil Arpaio laughs and boasts about witnessing first hand physical Torture while a DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent in Latin American where Arpaio was a lifelong DEA agent throughout Latin America.
These policies are designed to create a tolerable racist agenda for mass deportation. The basics are treating immigrants so abusively that they deport themselves and engaging all levels of law enforcement in routine and daily immigrant targeting, detention and deportation.
So what do we do?
It is our opinion that Attorney General Eric Holder and the Obama administration should indict Arpaio, put him on trail for abuse of power, civil rights violations and fraud. Given Arpaio’s firm entrenchment of corrupt cop goons and racists up and down the MCSO Holder and Obama should then put the MCSO into receivership.