While trying to find out the latest update on the vote for the U.S. Senate seat in Arizona, I noted that the Arizona Republic reported that even after more than a decade after former Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s infamous “saturation” and “shock and awe” sweeps in which dozens of deputies and their volunteer civilian posse would invade Hispanic neighborhoods and use any pretext (usually traffic stops) to detain anyone based simply on their race (sorry, “ethnicity”), the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office continues to shuffle its feet in implementing court-ordered reforms and processing abuse claims.
These raids were an illegal use of local law enforcement to conduct immigration raids, which Arpaio continued until he was found of guilty by a court of racial profiling and violation of civil rights, which included detaining people lawfully in the country and U.S. citizens without charge or warrant, simply because they were Hispanic.
The Republic noted yesterday that
A federal judge took a familiar step Tuesday, finding Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone to be in civil contempt of his long-standing court orders. U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow in Phoenix found the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office took too long to close investigations into staff misconduct, in a Tuesday ruling. That caseload has grown to more than 2,000, with investigators taking nearly two years to close them, on average. Snow ordered the Sheriff’s Office to begin reducing its growing backlog of internal investigations into all allegations of misconduct or else face stiff financial penalties that would have to be paid by taxpayers. He is the same judge who found former Sheriff Joe Arpaio in civil contempt of his orders. Another judge in Phoenix found Arpaio guilty of criminal contempt.
The slow-moving Obama Justice Department eventually found that Hispanics were nine times more likely than any other group in the county to be pulled over on traffic stops by Arpaio’s deputies, and would detain lawful residents and their children for hours or days in jail without charge or warrant. Arpaio claimed that he was not bound by state or federal laws, asserting that MCSO policy was to detain based on “suspicion” of being illegal, and then “find” a “crime” to justify having detained someone in the first place.
This was basically codified in SB 1070, passed by the legislature in 2010, which also made it a misdemeanor offense for anyone “suspected” of being an immigrant (which to say anyone who looks Hispanic) to not have his or her “papers” on their person to prove they were in the country legally; this man was subsequently arrested for “unlawfully” protesting the unlawful law:
The U.S. Supreme Court—the one without Trump’s court picks—found that most of the law’s provisions illegally preempted federal jurisdiction, but nevertheless upheld the easily abused portion that allows state law enforcement to “investigate” the legal status of anyone “stopped, detained or arrested” if there is a “reasonable suspicion” that a person is illegally in the country—which of course is to say anyone who looks “Mexican” can be “reasonably suspicious,” which is the same thing as justifying racial profiling. The majority decision conceded as much, specifying that a person could not be detained indefinitely simply for not having “papers” on their person, and that unlawfully detained people still had a right to file claims of racial profiling in these detentions.
Yet despite the fact that Penzone defeated Arpaio in the 2016 election, promising to comply with the court orders, there has been little headway in stopping abuses. Arpaio himself received a pardon from Donald Trump before he could have the privilege of spending time in one of his jail cells and enjoy having the opportunity to wear pink underwear and be served meatless meals:
Penzone admits that his office is slow in implementing a court-ordered plan which allows members of local communities to report instances of abuse by the Sheriff’s deputies and require them to be investigated. The number of these cases continue to rise rather than fall, which indicates that old habits die hard.
Judge Snow found that the lengthy time taken to close individual cases was a deliberate effort thwart reforming the behavior of the MCSO. While Penzone admits that the MCSO is not in “total” compliance with court orders, it is at least doing “better” than what would have been expected if Arpaio was still in office—which of course is just this side of meaningless, as the judge observed. The initial class action lawsuit by illegally detained lawful residents based on their race was in 2008, and despite the fact that in 2013 Arpaio was found guilty of violating the Constitutional rights of those detained, and in 2017 another federal judge found Arpaio in criminal contempt, the MCSO continues to thumb its nose at those rights, and continuing to target Hispanics at much higher rates than other groups.
Since 2008, lawsuits and the cost to county taxpayers for court-ordered reforms has passed $200 million. Judge Snow is now threatening to take the money out of the MCSO’s budget rather than adding to the taxpayer bill. Penzone continues to defend his actions, or lack thereof, complaining in August that "It's very easy to be a critic, when you've never had to manage an organization, you've never had to be responsible for law enforcement operations, where you've never had to balance court orders with organizational capacity, and you've never had to change a culture that existed for a quarter of a century.”
That begs the question if Penzone has any control over the MCSO, that deputies influenced by Arpaio are just “free agents” when it comes to adhering to the civil rights of Hispanics. Penzone claims that he is at least doing “something” apparently includes continuing Apraio’s illegal policy of allowing immigration officials to enter jails and harass all detainees of Hispanic origin on the assumption that they are all in the country illegally. The problem of course is that the massive cost to the county from the lawsuits and the court-ordered reforms have nothing to do with illegal immigrants, but from illegally detained lawful residents and citizens.
Arpaio’s actions and SB 1070 did have one positive effect: mobilizing Hispanic voters to actually get out and vote, helping Joe Biden win Arizona; FiveThirtyEight's unreliable method of tabulation claiming that the Democratic support among Arizona Hispanics in 2020 decreased is contradicted by other studies, which show Biden receiving 78-80 percent of the vote in Arizona, with the higher number voting making the margin larger. It appears in the midterms that their votes will likely help keep two Democrats in the U.S. Senate, and what appears to be the election of a Democrat as governor.
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