What Happened to Joe Arpaio?

I FEEL LIKE I’M LIVING IN a history book about backward eras that seem impossible in hindsight – the kind that make us shake our heads in disbelief and ask, “How could people back then tolerate that?”

The name Bull Connor comes to mind – the Alabama sheriff who terrorized blacks and fought integration in the 1960s. I was a young girl then, and the Civil Rights movement was something happening very far away from my safe, secure home in North Dakota.

Now, I pick up the paper or turn on the TV most days and feel like I’m watching Bull Connor on steroids. Only now we call him Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and he’s terrorizing Hispanics – only a few of whom are illegal immigrants. I’m not a young girl anymore, and this civil rights battle is happening very close to my safe, secure home in Arizona.

Every time I watch Sheriff Joe unleash his “posse” on another neighborhood with a high Hispanic population, arresting people with brown skin for the most stupid of offenses – honking their horn, having a tail light out, not signaling when they change lanes – I have to wonder how anyone could not see this as an assault on an entire race of people.

It’s gotten so outrageous that The New York Times tore Sheriff Joe apart in an April editorial. Declaring that Congress has botched immigration policy and given authority to others, such as sheriffs’ departments, to “mishandle” it even more, the paper wrote: “To see how unhinged things have become, it pays to zero in on the squalid doings in Maricopa County, Ariz. It is run by the county sheriff, Joe Arpaio, who has built a national reputation for toughness through years of cruelty to prison inmates and an insatiable appetite for publicity.”

The sheriff sends out press releases before these “sweeps,” the Times noted, drawing protesters, TV crews and “deport-’em-all hard liners.”

“Sheriff Joe, seemingly addicted to the buzz, has been filmed marching down the street shaking hands with adoring Minutemen,” the Times continued. “If this doesn’t look to you like a carefully regulated, federally supervised effort to catch dangerous criminals, that’s because it isn’t. It is a series of stunts…. The sheriff says he is keeping the peace, but it seems as if he is doing just the opposite – a useless, reckless churning of fear and unrest.”

The Times called on Congress to re-examine the powers it has given local sheriffs and investigate how that power has been misused, “starting with a subpoena for Sheriff Joe.”

In one breath, I thought the Times was right on. In the next, I wondered what happened to Sheriff Joe, because I remember when he was a voice of reason on immigration. No, I haven’t lost my mind or confused him with someone else. It was just as recently as 2005 when he decried “vigilantes” who went after suspected illegal immigrants and defended his deputies who arrested a hothead named Patrick Haab for pulling a gun on seven Mexican migrants at a rest stop on Interstate 8.

Joe made it very clear then how he wanted to handle the immigration issue. Let me quote him – a quote I bet has been reprinted in almost every newspaper in this state. In 2005, he told The Arizona Republic’s Michael Kiefer, “I want the authority to lock up smugglers, but I am not going to lock up illegals hanging around street corners. I’m not going to waste my resources going after a guy in a truck when he picks up five illegals to go trim palm trees.”

Here it is 2008, and he’s devoting considerable resources to go after the tree trimmers. And the maids at our tony resorts. And the housekeepers. And the guys who mow the lawns of Phoenix. Those resources – my tax money and yours – are being squandered on “sweeps” of neighborhoods populated mainly by American citizens of Hispanic descent. Sheriff Joe says he’s there to catch criminals, but anyone who looks at the results of his sweeps knows he’s whist-lin’ in the wind.

On one night in April in the Town of Guadalupe, he made 22 arrests, but only five of those arrested ended up being illegals and seven had outstanding arrest warrants for other crimes. Combined with a sweep the sheriff’s office conducted in Phoenix, the two events netted 73 illegal immigrants out of 150 arrests, according to The Arizona Republic.

It’s not that there aren’t enough real criminals in Maricopa County. In April, this county had around 76,000 active arrest warrants. Many weren’t for very serious crimes, but MCSO officials say at least 30,000 were for suspected rapists, murderers, pedophiles and assaulters. Instead of going after them, Sheriff Joe is arresting people for “improper use of horn.”

Somewhere along the line, Sheriff Joe declared war on everyone with brown skin, and this outrageous and un-American behavior is coloring everyone’s view of Arizona. But how in the world did he get to this point?

Here’s a little history lesson that will help put this all into perspective. You may remember that the hothead Patrick Haab was never prosecuted for holding those Mexicans at gunpoint. That’s because the newly elected county attorney, Andrew Thomas, who had run for election on an anti-immigration platform, said he wouldn’t charge Haab with any crime because of a state law that allows a citizen’s arrest when a felony is committed. (Technically, entering this country illegally is a misdemeanor unless you’ve already been deported and come back.)

But were people outraged by Thomas’s hard-line stance? No, siree. Thomas made national headlines and was invited to appear on Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes to brag about what he’d done. With the cheering squad of groups like the Minutemen and right-wing radio hosts, being a hard-ass on immigration was the new red meat of America.

Can it be possible, as many pundits believe, that Sheriff Joe watched that Fox News show and was jealous that the new county attorney was getting such praise when his own reasoned stance was being left behind in the dirt? Could he have made a 180-degree turn in his thinking because there were new opportunities for publicity if he became an uncompromising enforcer of illegal immigrants? Some believe it’s as simple as that, and the proof may be in the media pudding: The sheriff who once made fun of the uselessness of arresting gardeners now is making national news for arresting gardeners.

Most of the people he’s arresting in these sweeps aren’t illegal or “dangerous criminals” or even people with outstanding warrants. They’re American citizens who happen to have brown skin. You could call their offenses “driving while brown.”

You could also call these people “patsies,” because here’s another history lesson: Eight months ago, Arpaio and his ally, Thomas, had executives of Phoenix New Times arrested and demanded private information on the publication’s readership as retaliation for negative publicity. Both Republicans faced public ridicule for flouting the First Amendment – not exactly the ideal platform for an upcoming election season.

They needed a distraction, a local political expert says – one so big and controversial that voters would forget all about them trampling on their privacy and the press. The proof is in the headlines.

“For them, they better change the subject right away,” ASU’s David Berman told PHOENIX magazine at the time. “They’ll probably become even more intent on finding illegal immigrants and wrapping up their reputations in that realm.”

I am not the first and certainly won’t be the last columnist in this state to decry the blatant racism of Sheriff Joe’s sweeps and the ridiculous waste of time, personnel and money. And I have to say, I cheered the first time I saw Alfredo Gutierrez, a former state senator and gubernatorial candidate who often faces Arpaio at the illegal immigrant sweeps, scream into a bullhorn: “Sheriff Joe, you’re afraid to go after real criminals so you go after housewives and gardeners – you coward!”

While Sheriff Joe’s press releases contend Gutierrez is trying to put officers at risk, Alfredo says it’s just the opposite. “Arpaio intends to provoke a firestorm – he’s looking for a riot,” Gutierrez insists.

That’s what many fear, including the mayors of several Valley cities who have stood up against the sweeps. In fact, on April 4, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling for an investigation into whether Sheriff Joe has committed any civil rights violations. “Over the past few weeks, Sheriff Arpaio’s actions have infringed on the civil rights of our residents,” his letter reads. “They have put our residents’ well-being, and the well-being of law enforcement officers, at risk.”

It’s gotten so bad that even a 4-year-old American girl didn’t get any mercy from the sheriff’s office. You probably don’t know about this story unless you watch Spanish news stations, which reported on it while the mainstream press either ignored it or weren’t paying attention.

On March 28 – the night of the annual Cesar Chavez luncheon to celebrate Arizona’s most famous Hispanic son – 4-year-old Aracili Reyes was left in a hot, closed cab of a truck with the window barely open while police held her mother in a squad car nearby. The mother, Maria Aracili Reyes, had been in this country for a number of years working under legal visas, renewing them several times, but the last visa had expired within the past 90 days. She and her little girl were passengers in a car driven by a U.S. citizen of Hispanic descent who had a bench warrant for not appearing on a traffic citation. Deputies allowed the mother to call the little girl’s father, a legal Cuban immigrant, who rushed to the scene and found his daughter crying hysterically.

At 5:05 p.m., Lydia Guzman, director of Respect Respecto, a civil rights group, arrived at the scene and filmed the incident. “I thought this was very ironic,” she says. “Sheriff Joe arrests people for leaving dogs in a car, and here was this 4-year-old American citizen who was not given the same respect. It saddened me. I can’t believe this is what it’s come to.”

It saddens me, too. I just hope that more people speak up to let Sheriff Joe know we’re on to him, and that we’re tired, as Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon puts it, of his “made-for-TV stunts.”