Getting The Book Thrown At Him

The Justice Department's three-year investigation into countless civil rights violations by Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio has resulted in "the most egregious" examples of racial profiling of Latinos one career civil rights investigator has said he's ever even seen.

The inquiry’s findings paint a picture of a department staffed by poorly trained deputies who target Latino drivers on the roadways and detain innocent Latinos in the community in their searches for illegal immigrants. The mistreatment, the government said, extends to the jails the department oversees, where Latino inmates who do not speak English are mistreated.

“The absence of clear policies and procedures to ensure effective and constitutional policing,” the report said, “along with the deviations from widely accepted policing and correctional practices, and the failure to implement meaningful oversight and accountability structures, have contributed to a chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations.”

The report said Latino drivers were four to nine times more likely to be stopped in the sprawling county, which includes Phoenix and its environs, than non-Latino drivers. The expert who conducted the study called it the most egregious racial profiling he has ever seen in this country, said Mr. Perez, the prosecutor, without naming the expert.

The report said that roughly one-fifth of the traffic-related incident reports generated by the department’s human smuggling unit contained information indicating the stops may have been conducted in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures.

The report also suggested that Sheriff Arpaio’s well-publicized raids aimed at arresting illegal immigrants were sometimes prompted by complaints that described no criminal activity but referred to people with “dark skin” or to Spanish speakers congregating in an area. “The use of these types of bias-infected indicators as a basis for conducting enforcement activity contributes to the high number of stops and detentions lacking in legal justification,” the report said. 

So yes, rampant civil rights violations of Latinos, intimidation, harassment and even incarceration of Arpaio's critics, ridiculously biased racial profiling in routine stops and armed raids based solely on skin color or language.  And guess which Republican presidential candidate immediately backed Arpaio after the announcement?

"He is tough," Perry said, adding that if he's president he won't be suing states such as Arizona for adopting their own immigration laws because "the administration has been an abject failure at securing the border."

Right.  That gives Joe Arpaio and his actual police state in Maricopa County run by actual police all the rights in the world to go after legal immigrants and anyone who might be dark skinned or speak a language that might be Spanish.

This guy needs to go away, preferably to a place where he gets a healthy brick shit-ton of his own medicine daily.