Maricopa County (Arizona) sheriff Joe Arpaio is at it again, having passed the deadline for complying in good faith with the Justice Department requests for documentation in its on-going investigation of his office for violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. He continues to refuse to turnover arrest records or allow investigators to enter prison facilities or question inmates. The Justice Department threatened to sue Arpaio, but has for the time being delayed taking this action. This isn’t the first time that Arpaio has thumbed his nose at federal officials, of course; when he and his deputies were stripped of federal immigration authority for various abuses, the next day he sent out his deputies on another immigration sweep. Arpaio’s lawyers claim that he is not “obligated” to comply with requests related to "alleged patterns or practices of discriminatory police practices and unconstitutional searches and seizures conducted by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office"—even insofar as they are related to racial profiling and discrimination. Frustratingly, the federal government, while it has problems with abusing its authority to politicians who may or may not be involved in graft, it literally trembles before the likes of Arpaio.
It is rather shocking that Arpaio has received overly fawning consideration by the national media, and has been allowed to get away with clichés and “small” talk in response to accusations of racial profiling, discrimination and running a prison system that on several occasions lost its accreditation for failing to maintain national standards, and lying about compliance to those standards. Insight into Arpaios warped mind may be deduced by the titillation he gets from forcing inmates to wear pink underwear, or instituting juvenile and women chain gangs. Arpaio and his pal, County Attorney Andrew Thomas, have undertaken spurious vendettas against judges and local politicians who have opposed Arpaio’s operations. An Arizona Republic editorial recently noted the increase in “criminal” investigations for upsetting the tender sensitivities of Arpaio and Thomas, which Phoenix mayor Phil Gordon called a “reign of terror.” It is noted, however, that the only person “successfully” convicted from one of these vigilante prosecutions was school superintendent Sandra Dowling, for providing her daughter a summer job. The local media has been less sanguine than the national media in regard to Arpaio. The Phoenix New-Times has been battling the sheriff and the extremist right-wing in the state for years; back in 2004, a “special prosecutor” was appointed after the paper published Arpaio’s home address, and subsequently received a spurious subpoena that demanded a list of the IP addresses of anyone who might have seen the publication on-line. In response, the New-Times published the subpoena, which led to the arrest of two editors. The naked abuse of prosecutorial power led to the firing of the special prosecutor, but nothing was done to Arpaio.
Arpaio’s jails, meanwhile, have been the scene of many “untimely” and unexplained deaths and major injuries, particularly among the mentally or physically disabled that happen to be ensnared by Arpaio’s deputies. In 2003, the death of a blind and mentally-disabled man in jail for shoplifting was determined to have occurred not because he had fallen from his bunk, but because he had been severely beaten by deputies. In 1996, a paraplegic man arrested for marijuana possession became a quadriplegic when laughing guards placed his neck in a restraint, breaking his neck. Another mentally-disabled man died after being first losing consciousness after a spit-hood was placed over his head, and then apparently filled with a lethal dose methamphetamines in a failed effort to force him back into “life”; Maricopa County prison “health care” has, not surprisingly, been the subject of many complaints of being “substandard.”
More infamously was the case in 1996 when a BYU football player named Scott Norberg, who was arrested after being found walking in a “delirious” manner and allegedly assaulting a deputy, and died soon after arriving at a Mesa jail of what a coroner called "positional asphyxia." There is a well-done YouTube mini-documentary entitled “The Murder of Scott Norberg – An Arpaio Reality TV Exclusive." It begins with a jail dispatcher calling 9-1-1 about an inmate in their holding area who is not breathing. “Really?” “Uh-yeah.” “Are they doing CPR?” “Um…you know what, I don’t really know.” Norberg’s father admits that his son, a scholar-athlete in high school, found his way into drugs and alcohol, but none of this explained what happened to him in one of Arpaio’s jails. A witness testifies that he saw a disoriented Norberg wandering around a hall, then sitting on the ground crying. He was handcuffed and dragged by one foot to a cell, “because he didn’t respond fast enough” to commands. While sitting in a cell waiting for a court appearance to be charged, Norberg was inexplicably dragged out of the cell, and surrounded by a half-dozen guards with tasers, was repeatedly stunned about the chest and fisted in the head, all the while crying out for it to stop. A video captured the event, which shows indeed what Norberg’s father called it—a “feeding frenzy of the darkest side of people.” Another witnessed observed how Norberg was placed in a restraining chair, with a towel literally tied around his head; one guard was pulling his head forward, while another was simultaneously pulling it back. A guard noted that Norberg was turning purple, and received the response “Who gives a f-ck?” A jail clerk at the time noted that guards were afterwards laughing about their handiwork. Autopsy photos show Norberg’s head and body literally covered with bruises and ugly bluish patches. His larynx had been removed and “lost” in an effort to conceal the evidence of what had happened. Arpaio has not been allowed to forget this incident; years later, he is seen angrily denying that his people had done anything “wrong,” still trying to explain away the senseless killing by saying Norberg was high on drugs, although the autopsy noted that the drugs in his system were not sufficient to have played a part in his death.
A jury in a subsequent civil case would award Norberg's family $8.25 million for wrongful death. But this is just one more of many cases of inhuman brutality in Arpaio's jails; 60 inmates are claimed by one source to have been “murdered” in Maricopa County jails since Arpaio’s tenure, most of them similarly “inexplicable”—although this is only a “guesstimation” since Arpaio has also been accused of destroying relevant documents on abuses and deaths in his jails. The county has also been forced to pay nearly $50 million for abuses in Arpaio’s jails.
And then, of course, is the matter of Arpaio’s attitude toward “Mexicans," and not just illegal aliens. The Arizona law SB1070 has been called the “Joe Arpaio Racial Profiling Protection Act,” and for good reason. The Maricopa County deputies are so busy trying to ensnare illegal aliens that anyone who fits the “profile”—that is brown skin—is under threat. So tunnel-visioned is Arpaio and his deputies that a few of his jurisdictions have threaten to sue the department for failure to provide adequate police protection. Arpaio and his deputies have been accused of failing to follow-up on arrest warrants of anyone who isn’t Latino, thus allowing a great many felons with warrants to literally roam free, unless they are caught committing another crime. Arpaio has been careful not to enunciate his racism in too understandable terms, but his association with various anti-immigrant extremist groups and neo-Nazi figures have not gone unnoticed; Arpaio himself is unashamed, telling Lou Dobbs that he was “honored” to be compared to the KKK. Back in April, J.T. Ready and a bunch of his friends dressed in Nazi storm trooper garb showed up in Phoenix to express their support for Arpaio and his latest appointee as county attorney. A similar variety of friends joined Arpaio for a recent tour of the border.
There is no doubt that the Arizona law was designed by people who wanted to codify Arpaio’s racial attitudes, and to allow him to conduct his affairs without hindrance. The fact of Arpaio’s refusal to cooperate with the Justice Department should be taken as more evidence that his department’s racist record is so indefensible that it can’t bear the light of exposure. It is time for the DOJ to stand up to this arrogant bigot and show who is the real sheriff in town.
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