Not even remotely surprising:
In a harshly worded critique of the country’s best-known sheriff, the Justice Department accused Joe Arpaio of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office of engaging in “unconstitutional policing” by unfairly targeting Latinos for detentions and arrests and retaliating against those who complain.
After an investigation that lasted more than three years, the civil rights division of the Justice Department said in a 22-page report that the sheriff’s office has “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.” The department interfered with the inquiry, the government said, prompting a lawsuit that eventually led Mr. Arpaio and his deputies to cooperate.
“We have peeled the onion to its core,” said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, noting during a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning that more than 400 inmates, deputies and others were interviewed as part of the review, including Mr. Arpaio and his command staff. Mr. Perez said the inquiry, which also included jail visits and reviews of thousands of pages of internal documents, raised the question of whether Latinos were receiving “second-class policing services” in Maricopa County.
More bothersome to me than Arpaio is the fact that there are apparently enough voters in that area sick enough to keep supporting a sociopath like him.
Gus
I can see Arpaio quoting the report in his campaign literature.
Anoniminous
The GOP’s bigotry towards Hispanics may be putting Arizona in play. Hispanics are now (about) 19% of the vote in Arizona and they are registering people like crazy.
chortle, chuckle, gaffaw
4tehlulz
Obviously, this is Obama’s fault.
Nellie in NZ
I don’t think of onions as having a core.
Dork
Heh. It took them 3 years to conclude what anyone of us would have concluded in about a week of observation.
Scott
Still don’t know why the feds haven’t arrested the sumbitch.
BGinCHI
@Dork: Given the hornet’s nest this will stir up, especially when the right call this “a smear campaign,” they no doubt had to put this together VERY carefully. This is a federal investigation, not an article in the NY Post.
I’m glad to see them going after people like this who probably think they are too big to fail.
Jay in Oregon
@Gus:
Agreed. Joe Arpaio gets re-elected because the people who vote for him like that he’s keeping “those people” in their place.
He needs to share a cell with the judge who was getting kickbacks for throwing kids in juvenile court into privatized prisons.
piratedan
yo! DOJ! how about some charges eh?
Snarki, child of Loki
Pervasive violation of civil rights under color of law.
Sounds like a RICO case.
Silver
Racist shitheads vote for racist shitheads.
Arizona is full of racist shitheads.
Arpaio gets votes in Arizona.
This is surprising?
elmo
The article I read closed with the note that the USAO in AZ is also investigating whether to pursue criminal charges.
AxelFoley
@4tehlulz:
How’d you guess what El Tiburon was gonna say?
BGinCHI
Too bad the DOJ doesn’t have some patrol cars they could use to pull him over every day on his way home from work. You know, just to check his papers. He does have a funny last name after all….maybe a little time in a detention center would get to the bottom of it.
Seriously, these are the kind of assholes who will scream about due process the second they are confronted. Oh well, I guess he can count on Jan Brewer to pardon him anyway.
Ruckus
More bothersome to me than Arpaio is the fact that there are apparently enough voters in that area sick enough to keep supporting a sociopath like him.
Maybe they are sociopaths as well and think arpaio is normal. OK it’s a pretty weak maybe, more like a pretty sure thing. I’ll give them a little doubt that they may be just panty wetting racists instead of sociopaths.
srv
General Sheridan apparently never made it to Arizona.
trollhattan
That’s nothing, you should see how he treats the Irish.
I don’t know whether it’s the continual sun-baking, but the bwaaaaains down there seem to function in a suboptimal fashion. They keep electing this asshat.
El Cruzado
@srv: Maybe the one that should have gotten there is general Sherman .
DFH no.6
The overwhelming majority of voters in Maricopa County (including not a few Dems) keep putting Arpaio back in office over and over again precisely because he can be counted on to be an old-fashioned, hard-ass, lawnorder sheriff.
And in their eyes, targeting a group of known criminal-types (messkins) is a feature, not a bug.
Every conservative I have ever known is a racist. Every fucking one.
Roger Moore
@Nellie in NZ:
Neither does Joe Arpaio. Just an empty hole where his soul ought to be.
piratedan
@trollhattan: well this is the same jurisdiction that keeps giving us those other stalwarts of justice like Russell Pearce (sponsor of SB 1070) and Representative Trent Franks and guys like John Kyl… so it’s a large meaty ball of fail that doesn’t necessarily apply to the rest of the state.
p.a.
if I remember my Yglesias correctly, Arpaio’s district not only had the highest crime rate in the state, it was the only district with an INCREASING rate. Too busy harassing people to fight crime.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Fixed.
trollhattan
@piratedan:
How on gawd’s green earth did Napolitano ever get elected?
kay
If this is the same Thomas Perez that conservatives badgered, bullied and lied about for months on the New Black Panther Party/FOX News fake-scandal, I can’t believe he’s still walking around sane and coherent.
Mr. Perez survived that to fight another day. Must be a very resilient person.
eemom
OT, but where the hell are today’s threads on govt shutdown/payroll tax and detention bill/freakout??
Sully wrote a post on the latter ya know.
Biff Longbotham
@4tehlulz:@#4 Negative.
They started siffing around this guy during Bush’s administration. Won’t stop the kooks from blaming Obama, but at least the sane people out there will appreciate the distinction.
Holden Pattern
@Anoniminous:
William Rehnquist is spinning in his grave.
Carol from CO
FWIW – Maricopa County has rather large enclaves of Mormons who fled from UT from the north and Mexico from the south for one reason or another.
piratedan
@trollhattan: well not everyone in the state is looney tunes…. down south we have Congressional Representation from Ms. Giffords and Mr. Grijalva and Mr. Pastor. The Republicans have fielded a who’s who of fail to fill the governor’s chair too, previous we had Evan Mecham and Fife Symington, as such, that’s how Napolitano was elected.. in a pendulum swing of rejecting the crazy… but then again, a lot of Az politics is quite a bit like short attention span theater.
Schlemizel
@Holden Pattern:
More likely that Rehnquists ghouls are spinning ways to make sure a lot of that 19% doesn’t get a chance to vote.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@El Cruzado:
Sherman may have been more racist than Sheridan.
Thoughtcrime
Don’t worry, I hear that Senator Wyden has reached out to Sheriff Arpaio to work with him in drafting immigration and minority rights legislation.
JordanRules
The DOJ guy who did the presser was really good.
As always, Arpaio’s got alot of other stuff (other inquiries and investations and the ever-present backlog of lawsuits) going on too so I hope to FSM that this is the tipping point.
Mack Lyons
As long as he’s wailing on blacks, browns and the occasional white methhead, these people could care less what he does. Its only when he starts wailing on “one of theirs” do they get extremely upset.
Nellcote
via TPM DHS has cut him off from the ICE program too, based on the DOJ report.
handy
Led by whom? ERIC HOLDER BINGO! FAST AND FURIOUS FAST AND FURIOUS FAST AND FURIOUS LOL
/wingnut distraction
DFH no.6
None of the many, many conservatives I work with and live near have any problem with Arpaio at all.
His being a “tough-guy” racist asshole is especially endearing to them.
That the Usurper’s Justice Dept. (run by another ‘near’ Democrat) is after him is just further proof that “they” are the victims.
And all of them I’ve talked to recently are just chomping at the bit to vote for another sneering asshole – Gingrich (except for the Mormons, who are going with homeboy Romney).
Fucking fascists are the fucking enemy of mankind, including my own dear baby brother (who thinks we all need to “get over” Arpaio and let him do his job as he sees fit).
azlib
The only thing you need to know about Arpaio is he is a narcissist and will do anything to self-promote. The immigration sweeps were just a way for him to get publicity. 3 years ago he did not even bother with undocumented immigrants. They were not worth his time.
Arpaio has been wildly popular in Maricopa County up until he went after the local Maricopa Commissioners. That one tarnished his reputation quite a bit. And now the disclosure his department dropped the ball on child sexual abuse cases may be the last straw and might bring him down.
Sadly, it will be his political fight with other powerful politicians plus his incompetence in enforcing child abuse laws which may finally be his undoing and not what he did enforcing (or over enforcing) SB1070.
FlipYrWhig
If Arpaio ran for President, how would he fare among Republicans? 15%? Higher?
The Moar You Know
They love them some Joe out there in Arizona. He beats on the RIGHT kind of folks – brown people.
He’s a self-aggrandizing prick who knows how to feed the rubes the red meat they want. Kinda surprised that he didn’t run for President this cycle along with all the other lunatics and grifters.
DFH no.6
@Anoniminous:
If enough of this demographic actually got their happy asses out to vote for once, then things could change for the better around here.
But much like the very youngest registered voters, who also typically lean heavily-Dem, Latino voters just seldom actually vote in anything close to the percentage of their population that older, whiter (and more Republican) voters do.
Only when (if) that changes will matoko-chan’s “demographic timebomb” (or whatever she calls it) have any effect.
Pretty goddamn frustrating for those of us who have been registering and canvassing and campaigning for decades.
El Cruzado
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): Maybe so (his beliefs on the matter did improve through time although probably not as much as they ought to). He was pretty good at cleaning up racist pits though.
Brandon
What bothers me is that after a 3 year investigation concluding that Arapio is violating constitutional rights did not culminate in his arrest and trial. So let me get this straight, the Rodney King cops and the Crown Heights rioters can get brought up on federal civil rights charges, but not this guy? I didn’t realize that DOJ was now in the business of conducting investigation for the sole purpose of publishing academic reports, like USGS or something. They need to either put up or shut up, because it is absolutely amoral and contrary to their duty to point fingers and walk away. No one is protected, civil rights are continually violated and the perpetrator can be justifiably aggrieved because they can rightly say that the government is defaming them.
The Moar You Know
@DFH no.6: Yep. And some others. Couple of lifelong Democrats I know, who happened to be racist but otherwise reasonably liberal (one is the biggest Bill Clinton fan you’d ever meet) went full-metal Teatard as soon as Obama won the primary.
The only reason: black guy in the White House. They just simply weren’t having it.
gaz
This is excellent news for John McCain!
Richard
Why isn’t this guy in jail?
The largest criminal organization in the state is apparently the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office.
gaz
Ruh Roh – That douchebag russell pierce ain’t got Arpio’s back anymore.
Maybe steven seagal will save him.
gaz
@DFH no.6: I can’t say the same. I know a couple that aren’t racist. Dumb maybe. Deluded. But decent human beings that still haven’t figured out the fact that the GOP in it’s modern form, is a party for self-identified sociopaths, grifters, and criminals.
gaz
@Thoughtcrime: LOL. careful. You just lit a match in the thread. heh.
Chris
@DFH no.6:
This. It’s what drove me away from their side of the aisle when I started looking at politics first. Not even their politicians so much as their voters.
Okay, to be fair: not all of them were racist. Some were only fundamentalists, nationalists, sexists… whatever. But the sense that “I’m better than you because I was born into this group and you weren’t”… whether the “group” in question is defined by race, religion, nationality, gender, sexuality or something else… is something that runs through virtually the entire Republican base. I’ve met very, very few Republicans that I didn’t think were some form of bigot or other.
merrinc
Am I the only one who thought it was rich that the report’s author has a Latino surname?
Also, too : TPM reports the DHS is cutting off his access to ICE programs:
Mnemosyne
@p.a.:
That’s what happens when you decide that certain people aren’t worthy of police protection — lots of assholes will suddenly show up to take advantage of that and, guess what, they won’t restrict themselves just to the “allowed” group, either.
This is why most cops really, really, really hate being turned into immigration police — it makes their jobs a whole lot harder and increases crime rates because immigrant crime victims are afraid to report.
Jay B.
@Brandon:
That’s a lot of backward-looking you got going on, man.
Think of it this way, just like the fact that we can now detain people indefinitely (above board and legal like), we can ALSO not detain people even after they blatantly break the law. It’s the great thing about having no meaningful rule of law. The Latinos in Arizona and the “suspected terrorists” can completely disappear for any reason at all, but if you are a powerful, elected official, a rich scumbag or some combination of either, there’s no force on Earth that can touch you.
As a white male, I look forward to continued protection from laws that only apply to lesser people.
trollhattan
@gaz:
He still haz the Wolverines! Amirite?
gaz
@trollhattan: heh
Captain C
He does a very good job of scaring the already high-turnout Sun City types to the polls by convincing them via lies and publicity stunts that he’s the only one who can protect them from the (not actually existing) impending brown people-initiated crime wave. That, and some of his campaign tactics (notably including accusing an opponent, who was the victim of child molestation, of being a child abuser) are awful enough to have Karl Rove thinking to himself, “this guy’s gone a little to far.” (OK, maybe not.)
I suspect that one reason he keeps running for office (he is, IIRC, in his late 70s at least and overweight enough that he can’t be too healthy) is that when the next Sheriff comes in, said Sheriff will find enough evidence of Joe’s corruption to put him (Joe) away for life, just in the process of straightening out the office.
Having lived in Maricopa County for 12 years, I can testify with certainty that the area has higher than its share of loons and wingnuts.
Southern Beale
Cue right-wing outrage over someone with the surname “Perez” being put in charge of this investigation ….
Mino
@Brandon: Just beginning to notice that about our Justice Dept? I dont’ know how they justify their salaries, frankly.
RSA
@Roger Moore:
And the effort to find that out makes you want to cry.
IrishGirl
EXACTLY my sentiments John…drives me to distraction the idiocy of the wingnuts here in AZ…really the worst of the worst….having lived in several places in the South and now AZ, I think AZ conservatives make Southern wingnuts look quaint.
Mnemosyne
@Brandon:
You have no clue how these civil rights investigations of police departments actually work, do you? The civil rights division doesn’t file criminal charges. The grand jury does. Oh, and look, there’s one of those, too:
But, yes, please continue complaining about a process you’re completely ignorant of since it seems to make you feel better.
ETA: To be completely clear, since people don’t seem to understand how it works, the investigation was of the department itself, not of Arpaio. The investigation of Arpaio is separate from that of the department, because you can’t send the Sheriff’s Department of Maricopa County to jail as a unit, but you can punish the Sheriff’s Department as a unit and force them to take particular actions by legal decree.
Desert Rat
It’s not hard to imagine how he gets reelected. He is, without question, particularly now that McCain has been relegated to backbench status, the most powerful politician in the State of Arizona.
Why do I claim this? Democrat Janet Napolitano, former Arizona Governor, Obama’s DHS Secretary, and US Attorney under Clinton, as attorney general in Arizona from 1995-2003, once dropped an investigation of impropriety in Arpaio’s office in exchange for his endorsement during her first run for governor.
Arpaio gets a lot of out of state money (he’s already got a $6 Million war chest assembled for the next election, and no serious opposition yet), and he and his supporters make the prospect of running against him so unappealing (mainly through character assassination) that he hasn’t faced a serious challenger during his term in office since getting reelected the very first time back in the dark ages.
Svensker
I’ve got a cousin who think’s Arpaio is the bees knees. Course he also reads World Net Daily and thinks Pam Geller is an upstanding citizen and intellectual. He was such a nice little kid. Smart, too.
Chris
@Desert Rat:
I don’t know if this happened in Arpaio’s district, but more on Arizona-wingnut related news – I remember hearing that several moderate Republicans chose to resign after the Giffords shooting, as they’d been getting death threats out the wazoo from teabagger/militia fringe psychos, and the shooting incident convinced them it wasn’t safe being in Arizona politics anymore.
I’m not from around there, but from this outsider’s POV, the state seems to be literally at the point of rule through terror.
lou
Wasn’t there just a big news report about how Arpaio and his team failed to investigate child sex abuse cases in this one town that had contracted with the county that had to cut its police department? How’s that lawnorder hardass, letting perverts and pedophiles run free? Wouldn’t that start turning his supporters against him?
Ruckus
@Svensker:
Most little kids are nice. It’s the growing up part that sometimes goes wrong. Sometimes terribly wrong. Like they become serial killers, rapists or even conservatards. I also hear that some conservatards are smart but I haven’t seen any conclusive proof. In fact, only the opposite.
nalbar
I heard he was going to be sheriff next year. Supposedly he is going to be hired as head football coach at Penn State.
.
Thoughtcrime
@merrinc:
Napolitano met with Arpaio to inform him personally:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWtAZwxK5H0
The Other Chuck
@FlipYrWhig:
Among the general electorate? I think we know that number. 27%.
Cacti
As a resident of the big slice of hell that is Maricopa County, AZ, these charges are richly deserved, but they bring me no joy at all.
Arpaio and his subordinates are jack-booted, authoritarian scum. But rather than revile him, a majority of the voters here applaud him for it and encourage more of the same. Everyone who ever cast a ballot for Arpaio has a hand in what happened to day.
Fuck them all.
Kyle
The sheriff’s office has “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that
“reaches the highest levels of the agency.”reflects the bigoted sadist assholes who voted for him. They get to vicariously brutalize brown people through him.Mike G
“If I owned Hell and Texas, I’d rent out Texas and live in Hell.”
Great quote. I suspect it would apply equally to Maricopa County. It seems to be the magnet for authoritarian rightard bigots from all over the country.
Lex
@Scott: This. Conspiring to deny people their civil rights is a felony. Arpaio needs to be doing hard time.
Thymezone
First, there is nothing unique about Maricopa County. It’s ruled by voter apathy, the same kind that has given you the Tea Party and your rotten government. Sensible voters don’t get motivated, idiots organize and get out the vote. 2010 saw something like a 42% national voter turnout if I remember correctly. Whatever the exact figure was, it was less than half. That means that one fourth of eligible voters can control your elections and your government. The remedy is for sensible people to get off their asses, quit sitting around on the internet bitching about how Obama didn’t get them a pony, and do something useful, and vote. If that happened, all the idiots would go away to the shadows where they belong. And then the blogs would have to find something else to bitch about. Which they won’t bother to do, because a world of shit drives up the blog reads, and that’s what it’s all about. That’s why DougJ writes posts every day about the stupidest shit he can find, that way nobody has to focus on actually doing anything.
Second, and B, the Feds have been after Joe for years. He always weasels out of the trouble. Maybe not this time, though. We shall see.
Thymezone
@Anoniminous:
They better damned well vote. They are 30%+ of the population and should be voting at 30% of the election outcomes. But they are as apathetic, or more so, than the average voter. If they continue to sit on their thumbs and fail to get involved and vote, the Arpaio minority will continue to shit on them until hell freezes over.
Government belongs to those who show up. That’s about it.
Thymezone
@Silver:
Arizona has no more shitheads than any other state. What it lacks is political organization and voter involvement. As does the whole fucking country for the most part. What ARizona does have is a strong element of people who know a lying lazy cocksucker like you when they see one, though.
horatius
And what the fuck are you gonna do about it Justice Department?? When will we see Joe’s ugly mug in Pink underwear in a tent-prison?
writewhatsright
Sheriff Arpaio was quoted as saying, “This is a sad day for America as a whole,” suggesting that the federal government’s suit against him is tantamount to a neon welcome sign for illegal immigrants.
It’s not fair to bash Arizona’s illegal immigrants, per se. However, the Justice Department is violating the human rights and the civil rights of immigrants by using itself as a conduit to encourage trafficking in illegal immigration. That’s right trafficking. People are being brought into this country illegally by sophisticated means, and the beneficiaries of this people-cargo are the businesses that underwrite the trafficking, the criminal underworld that abuse and intimidate the illegals, the non profit organizations that guarantee the six figure incomes of their executives by promoting stereo types through gross generalizations of those politically labeled “latino,” and the attorneys that make a living on the perpetual existence of illegal entry into the United States. It is a travesty, so why does the US federal government argue that the poor and desperate of Latin America deserve to enter the United States in such a repugnant way? Why does the federal government feel that these desperate people are beneath LEGAL entry into the USA?
On another vein, the Justice Department’s expert on measuring racial profiling said that the Arpaio-case is the most egregious case of racial profiling in the nation. But how is that possible if the Justice Department is labeling those “racially” profiled as only “latino” or “Hispanic?” Having a Spanish or Portuguese surname, or speaking Spanish has nothing to do with Latin Americans’ BIOLOGY because in colonial Latin America a Spanish or Portuguese(christian) surname, was a pre condition to being baptized, and, more importantly, those languages are the official languages in Latin America. The political label “latino” has NO racial characteristics attributed to it, therefore one can only GUESS if a person driving a car is politically labeled “latino”? So, if it’s a guessing game then it is a 50/50 chance that the person stopped is or isn’t politically labeled “latino.” Most of Arizona’s illegal immigrant population is native American or native American mix from Mexico, so how is it that the federal government refuses to acknowledge that those profiled racially are being profiled because they are NATIVE AMERICAN-latinos. Latin Americans are as diverse as non Latin Americans, so what is Sheriff Arpaio’s biological criterial for selecting and stoping individuals driving cars if not native American? If, however, in its suit, the Justice department is officially stating the bigoted position that all Latin Americans are dark or racially the same, and therefore that all Latin Americans are easily identifiable a single biological race, then it is the US Justice department that is, through this bigoted position, violating the civil rights of everyone politically labeled Latino.