America's Worst Sheriff™ Joe Arpaio loses to ACLU in Federal Court

Balladeer08 said:

Could you perhaps post a numbered list of things he has done in disregard for human decency?

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Here ya go.

Joe Arpaio is the Republican sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who seems to have forgotten that the sheriff's office is an agency for upholding the law, rather than a vehicle for promoting his own personal brand.

Illegal immigration

Arpaio has taken a very hard line against illegal immigration. So hard, in fact, that he declines to hand illegal immigrants over to federal authorities for deportation in lieu of a stint in jail,[1] and the sheriff's office is so busy trying to hunt illegal immigrants that it has little time for anything else.[2] The end result of all of this is that the Justice Department filed a civil suit against Arpaio in Federal court in May 2012 due to multiple civil rights violations primarily aimed at the Latino population of Maricopa County.[3]

Civil rights violations

Arpaio, like a large number of Republicans, talks a good talk on cost-cutting. Unlike most of the prominent politicians in his party, however, he has actually cut some costs. For example, he has cut food costs in the jails of Maricopa County by starving jail inmates, he has cut building costs by jailing people in tents in often triple-digit heat,[4] and he has cut maintenance costs by letting the jails rot. Unfortunately, these cost-cutting measures have been more than offset by the massive number of lawsuits filed against the sheriff's office, resulting in more than $43 million paid out in settlements.[5]

In 2008, a federal court ruled that conditions in the jails were unconstitutionally harsh.[6] Arpaio, perhaps preoccupied with his fledgling clothing-design career, did not seem to get the memo; two years later, another ruling held that conditions had not changed and ordered him to get off his keister.[7] Yet somehow he keeps getting chosen as sheriff.

Using public office for self-promotion

Arpaio uses the sheriff's office, including its official communication organs, as self-promotion tools, including but not limited to the publication of his political differences with the federal government[8] and of his opinions on Arizona political happenings.[9]

Sometime in the 1990s, the underwear given to inmates in Maricopa County jails was dyed pink to prevent inmates from walking off with it. Arpaio used this as a pretext to brag about how well he has served his constituents.[10] He also, in 1995, began to sell this pink underwear as a souvenir item through an outfit called the Posse Foundation, with funding from the sheriff's office; there were allegations that the money thus received was being mishandled.[11] Unfortunately for poor Joe, use of the pink underwear in prisons is currently under scrutiny[12] by an appellate court.[13]

In 2007, Arpaio set up a radio station, KJOE, in the basement of one of the jails, broadcasting operas, patriotic songs, and educational programming.[14] This makes one wonder precisely what his position is on certain other taxpayer-funded radio stations with similar programming.

Sexual assault cases? What sexual assault cases?

It looks like while Big Joe was busy rounding up his posse of Mexican hunters and pot busters, he may have chanced to overlook over 400 sexual assault cases, most of which involve children.[15] Either these cases slipped under his nose while he was busy being a hero-cum-underwear vendor to all right-thinking people in Arizona, or he deliberately turned a blind eye since many of the victims' parents were in the country illegally. These revelations have provoked many calls for him to resign.[16]

Birtherism

Sheriff Arpaio has recently taken up the cause of birtherism, arguing that President Obama's birth certificate and selective service (draft) registration card are fakes. His volunteer "Cold Case Posse," in conjunction with Jerome Corsi, conducted an "investigation" and then held an excruciatingly long press conference to announce their findings: the documents are fraudulent and Obama was probably born abroad and is not eligible to be President.[17] Their evidence was heavily dependent on the idea that the birth certificate's electronic form, as released online by the White House, differed from a "control" sample certificate that they scanned themselves.

Interestingly, the day before Sheriff Joe's "Cold Case Posse" released their report, the lead investigator, Michael Zullo, published a book on the topic, co-authored by a helpful Jerome Corsi.[18][19]

Not content with hosting one excruciating dog and pony show on the subject, Arpaio and Zullo took a second stab at the same comedy-ready material in July 2012, adding some extra spice to the mix by insisting that sooper sekrit codes were hidden in the birth certificate and that some very old person (apparently not present at the press conference; go figure) could figure out what those secret codes actually meant. Not content to leave it at that, Arpaio and Zullo also asserted that black helicopters Hawaiian police were following Zullo around in an effort to harass him during his "investigation".[20] Mind you, none of this has anything to do with the civil lawsuit being filed against Arpaio at all.[21]

School protection posse

In early 2013, after the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School[22] Sheriff Arpaio announced he would form an all volunteer posse of "well trained", gun-carrying patrols to drive around town and protect the schools. Not one school has ever requested such services, of course, and many schools and parents are outraged at the use of volunteer, virtually untrained men protecting the schools. In early February 2013, it was discovered that his posse included at least one convicted child molester, and several men convicted of domestic abuse. The training for the team was given by police tactician and ammunitions expert actor Steven Seagal who defended himself by saying "I’ve put hundreds of thousands if not millions of hours into my weapons training"[23]. For the record, 100,000 hours is 11.41 years of 24-hour days.

Ersatz cultural criticism

Arpaio also challenged George Lopez to "meet (him) face to face" after he took selective outrage offense to some of Lopez' material concerning Arpaio that aired on HBO in July 2012. He was also supposedly shocked by the naughty, naughty words that Lopez used during the monologue as well even before the fact became apparent that Lopez was talking about Arpaio at the time. Yeah. Sure.[24]

KRCummings said:

Please, I'm sure there are way worse sheriffs in this country than that asshole.

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But none with a bigger mouth or dumber followers.

Do a search on how much Joe has cost the taxpayers with his grand standing.

And yet, even with pink boxers, he has been reelected no less than five times.

doowdniw said:

And yet, even with pink boxers, he has been reelected no less than five times.

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Maricopa County is a hotbed of Vettemanism.

It gets better.

A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday ordered a controversial Arizona sheriff to undergo the same training as his deputies to prevent racial profiling and unlawful detention in the wake of the lawman's recent comments.

U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow criticized sheriff Joe Arpaio during a hearing in Phoenix for telling a reporter he would have no problem conducting an immigration sweep like one performed in the town of Guadalupe in 2008, which was later declared unconstitutional.

The judge ruled in May 2013 that Arpaio, who bills himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff," violated the rights of Latino drivers with his crackdown on illegal immigration and ordered him to stop using race as a factor in law enforcement decisions.

Snow said Arpaio's recent comments undermined his office's efforts to comply with the ruling.

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