Coyote Blog

For those of you not in Arizona that wonder from all the articles about him why Sheriff Joe is still elected by almost landslide majorities, and why Republicans all over the state still beg him for his endorsement, here it is:

A subsequent examination of the sheriff’s file showed that residents of Maricopa County wrote to him regarding the presence of Mexicans in greater Phoenix.

Citizens saw day laborers. They saw people with brown skin. They heard Spanish spoken.

And what the letters reveal is enormous anxiety about Hispanics:

• “I always see numerous Mexicans standing around in that area . . . These Mexicans swarmed around my car, and I was so scared and alarmed . . . I was never so devastated in my life regarding these circumstances . . . Although the Mexicans at this location may be within their legal right to be there . . . I merely bring this matter to your attention in order that all public agencies, FBI, etc., may be kept informed of these horrific circumstances.”
• “I would love to see an immigrant sweep conducted in Surprise, specifically at the intersection of Grand and Greenway. The area contains dozens of day workers attempting to flag down motorists seven days a week.”
• “The Mesa police chief drags his feet and stalls . . . the head of the Mesa police union is a Hispanic.”
• “As a retiree in Sun City, formerly from Minnesota, I am a fan of yours and what you are doing to rid the area of illegal immigrants . . . when I was in McDonald’s at Bell Road and Boswell (next to the Chase Bank) this noon, there was not an employee in sight, or within hearing, who spoke English as a first language — to my dismay. From the staff at the registers to the staff back in the kitchen area, all I heard was Spanish — except when they haltingly spoke to a customer. You might want to check this out.”

And Sheriff Arpaio did check it out.

None of the Hispanics described in the letters had broken the law. It is not against the law to speak Spanish or work as a day laborer.

Arpaio nonetheless gave the correspondence to Deputy Chief Brian Sands. Federal Judge Snow determined that raids and roundups quickly followed. Hispanics were rousted because white people were uncomfortable.

Sheriff Joe once did a roundup in tony Fountain Hills, which I would be surprised if it had even 5% Hispanic population, and managed to drag in for various petty violations (e.g. cracked windshield) a group that was about 95% Hispanic.  His favorite thing to do, when he isn’t busting into homes with Hollywood celebrities, is to send his deputies into a business and have them handcuff everyone with brown skin and refuse to release them until they or their family members have arrived to prove they are in the US legally.

This whole article is a good roundup of yet another abusive side of Arpaio, his flagrant disregard for public records laws and the rules of evidence.  In Maricopa County, “exculpatory evidence” and “shredded” have roughly the same meaning.

If nothing else, the OWS movement is helping ordinary Americans see the abuse of power that is so endemic in many police departments.  I am tired of the quasi-cult of police ass-kicking on average citizens, as fed by reality cop shows and folks like Joe Arpaio.  As Radley Balko points out, the casual way that the officer hoses down citizens who are just sitting on a curb with pepper spray is just outrageous.  From past experience, my guess is that these guys were ready to go limp and be dragged off – the pepper spray was just pure torture for the entertainment of the cops.

We would not do this to a terrorist in Gitmo, so why are we doing this to American citizens? I think I get particularly angry and intolerant of this kind of crap because I used to be the kind of law and order conservative that would excuse this kind of behavior, and that embarrasses me. The saying goes that a converted Catholic is often more fervent than a born one, so to I guess for this civil libertarian.

Joe Arpaio, I suppose seeing how Ben Quayle rode his writing gig for the Dirty into Congress, has decided he wants to compete with all manner of bottom-fishing web sites.  He has created a special web feature in a what he states is an attempt to drive more people to his web site — the goofy booking photo of the day.

Several local lawyers, including some mental health advocates, are asking if it is appropriate for a sheriff to run online contests to vote for the inmate with the worst booking photos.  This is a great example of a situation (like video surveillance) where public officials have less, rather than more rights and privileges than ordinary citizens.  Kudos to Scott Ambrose for making a point that is seldom made, and we should remind politicians of all the time:

Arpaio says that booking photos are aired in the news media every day. A local alternative weekly even took a page from Arpaio’s playbook earlier this year and let readers have fun with some of the sheriff’s mug shots.

“Sheriff Joe will argue that ‘I can do this because New Times can,’ ” Ambrose said. “There’s lots of things the government can’t do that you and I can.”

I have another question – for what possible public purpose is Arpaio spending taxpayer money to drive people to his web site?  This is so incredibly self-serving its hard to believe, but fits right in with Arpaio’s whole history of taxpayer-funded self-promotion.

PS-  I have always argued that booking photos should not be public information, as they amount to an improper punishment.  The legal system has a technical term for someone who has been arrested but has not gone to trial:  Innocent.

http://ktar.com/category/local-news-articles/20110215/Arpaio-leads-in-poll-for-Senate-race/

The early returns are in, and right now it would seem Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has the early edge in replacing Jon Kyl.

According to Roll Call, Arpaio led a field of potential Republican candidates by 21 percent in a poll of likely GOP primary voters.

Though this makes us feel better, a little

Maricopa County’s self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” Joe Arpaio, says he’s considering running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Senator Jon Kyl.

That said, New Times guaran-damn-tees he won’t actually run.

“The issue is whether I want to leave this office and go to Washington and try to make a difference there, which I would do if I run and win,” the 78-year-old Arpaio tells The Hill. “I think I could do that job.”

Sorry, Joe, we’ve heard it all before.

As you may recall, Arpaio pulled a similar stunt last year when he claimed to be considering running for governor. And he did the same thing four years earlier, when he also claimed he was mulling over a run for the governorship.

In neither case did Arpaio actually run.

You see, Arpaio seems to get off on seeing his name in the headlines, and what better way to make that happen than to continually fuel speculation about potentially running for office — and a poll showing he’s the front-runner certainly doesn’t help things.

Update: This was an interesting post about how TV has become far more accepting of police and proprietorial abuse in its heroes, comparing quasi-terrorist Steve McGarrett from the current incarnation of Hawaii 5-0 with the respectful and conscientious Jack Lord version.  Next up, the new show Arpaio 4-8?

Like many libertarians, I am tempted not to vote each election, though I usually do.  However, choosing between whatever lesser evil exists in the Coke or Pepsi party gets tiresome.  Given that, I have never voted in a party primary, until yesterday when I voted in the Republican primary simply to vote against Andrew Thomas for state Attorney General.  Thomas has for years been Joe Arpaio’s chief enabler and of late as County Attorney has spent his time launching frivolous lawsuits against his political enemies, from County supervisors to judges.  When attorneys from adjacent counties would not support his suits, he sought criminal charges against them.

Most recently, it was revealed that a series of grand juries, which typically will indict an inanimate object, not only refused to indict in several of his cases but ordered him to shut down the investigation entirely.  This useless prosecution of a County Supervisor turned out to be part of a plan.  When Thomas decided to vacate the County Attorney position to run for state DA, he disagreed with many of the County Supervisors as to who his replacement should be, and as narrated in this letter, began filing charges against Supervisors to deny them a quorum  (apparently some quid pro quo discussions, of the sort “we will drop the charges if you vote how we want” were actually recorded and turned over to the US Attorney, so if Thomas should win his election we be following the NY/Spitzer path of having our top state legal officer facing felony charges and disbarment.

Unfortunately, Thomas (and Arpaio) have somehow become folk-heroes among lame-brained Arizona voters, who tend to accept any sort of civil rights violations by officials as necessary measures to maintain the peace in the face of the dreaded Mexican immigration wave, so their re-election chances are not necessarily hurt by near Louisiana or Chicago levels of abuses of power.

I was tempted not to vote — you know, one vote won’t matter — because I felt downright icky actually voting in the Coke primary.  But in AZ, the Coke primary is pretty much the election since the state is so full of Coke voters, so I did it.  As it turns out, my vote may matter.

99.7% of Precincts Reporting
(2232 of 2239 Precincts)

Don’t know a thing about Tom Horne, but I eagerly voted for him as not-Thomas.  Here is the lock of the week:  with a vote this close, Thomas will keep this in the court for months, perhaps years.  If he gets the wrong decision, he will go after the judge, and if that doesn’t work…..

Update: Apparently, Arpaio got his guy elected in the race to fill Thomas’s county attorney seat, so I suppose once we get rid of one Arpaio-enabler we just end up with another.  I took Arpaio’s list of people he endorsed yesterday and the only votes I cast were for whoever the challenger was to team Arpaio.

Update #2: This is a depressing quote (emphasis added)

Oddly, the truth-telling was attributed to our own local Pinocchio, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, in regards the decisive victory of Bill Montgomery over interim Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley.

“That’s going to make my job very easy,” Arpaio said of Montgomery’s win.

On this blog, over the last couple of months, I have presented a pretty clear set of facts showing that, with the possible exception of some rural border regions beset by drug gangs, the vast majority of Arizona has experienced rapidly falling crime rates, in fact crime rates falling much faster than in the rest of the country.  The crime rates of even our key border towns has remained flat.

What to make, then, of these statements by our governor.

Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday reiterated her assertion that the majority of illegal immigrants are coming to the United States for reasons other than work, saying most are committing crimes and being used as drug mules by the cartels.

Brewer’s remarks are an expansion of comments she made last week during a televised debate between the four Republican gubernatorial candidates….

In the debate, Jette [a candidate running against Brewer] said that most people who cross illegally into Arizona are “just trying to feed their families.” Brewer disputed that, saying, “They’re coming here, and they’re bringing drugs.

And they’re doing drop houses, and they’re extorting people and they’re terrorizing the families.” The governor, who has become a national media figure since signing Senate Bill 1070 into law on April 23, went further on Friday, saying that the “majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming (into) the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels.”

When pressed, Brewer said that even those who do come to the United States looking for work are often ensnared by the cartels.

“They are accosted, and they become subjects of the drug cartels.”

Estimates are that there are 8-12 million illegal immigrants in the US (Brewer’s hispano-phobic allies would put the number much higher).  They are mostly all drug dealers and criminals?  Really?

I try really hard not to try to guess at what motivates folks I disagree with by assuming they are driven by something dark and evil, but how else in this case can one describe opinions like this so contrary to facts as anything other than prejudice against a particular ethnic group?

Just look at the actions of our governor and folks like Joe Arpaio.  If it really were the case that illegal immigrants are all criminals uninterested in legal work, then why is so much recent legislation aimed at business owners that hire illegal immigrants?  Or at day labor centers?  Why are all of Sheriff Joe’s immigration sweeps raiding lawful businesses rather than, say, crack houses?  After all, if illegal immigrants are all just drug dealers not looking for real work, why spend so much time looking for them, uh, doing real work?

Postscript: If Brewer is in fact correct, then there is a dead easy solution for the illegal immigration problem — legalize drugs.  She and I both agree that the worst criminal elements of illegal immigrants would be much less of a problem without the illegal drug trade.  The only difference is that I think that segment makes up less than 1% of the population of illegal immigrants, and she thinks its everyone.

Further, to the extent that some illegal immigrants just trying to support their families are “ensnared” by drug cartels (whatever that means) it is because of their immigration status.  Make them legal residents of the country, and no one has any particular leverage over them.

Note to Commenters: Many, many of you have disagreed with me vociferously on immigration.  Please, I would love to see reasoned comments defending Brewer, particularly with data.  In particular, please use the laws of supply and demand to explain how the majority of 8-12 million people are able to earn a living in the illegal drug trade in the southwest.  To help you out, there are about 6.6 million people in Arizona.  Based on national rates of 8% of over age 12 being users, about 500,000 of those are illegal drug users.  One estimate is that there are 500,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona.

Update: Are she and I living in the same state?

Arizona GOP Gov. Jan Brewer claimed recently that law enforcement has been finding beheaded bodies in the desert — but local agencies say they’ve never encountered such a case.

“Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded,” Brewer said Sunday, suggesting that the beheadings were part of increased violence along the border.

But medical examiners from six of Arizona’s counties — four of which border Mexico — tell the Arizona Guardian that they’ve never encountered an immigration-related crime in which the victim’s head was cut off.

I like to prominently highlight when I have been wrong.  In the past, I have said that the US follows a double standard on our Mexican and Canadian borders.  Where are the Canadian wall proposals?  Where are the Canadian workers getting handcuffed by Joe Arpaio.

But apparently I was wrong.  The US is working hard to apply an equal level of obnoxiousness to Canadians.

Proponents of tougher immigration enforcement often use crime as their big scare factor in trying to influence people to their point.  Only tougher laws and Joe Arpaio, they caution, stand athwart the coming immigrant rape of Phoenix.

But when the case is built on one or two high-profile crime where the perpetrator has not even been identified, rather than statistics, we can be suspicious of how strong the case is.  I have cited historical figures here, but the WSJ has the new figures for 2009:

Violent crime fell significantly last year in cities across the U.S., according to preliminary federal statistics, challenging the widely held belief that recessions drive up crime rates.

The incidence of violent crimes such as murder, rape and aggravated assault was down 5.5% from 2008, and 6.9% in big cities. It fell 2.4% in long-troubled Detroit and plunged 16.6% in Phoenix, despite a perception of rising crime that has fueled an immigration backlash….

In Phoenix, police spokesman Trent Crump said, “Despite all the hype, in every single reportable crime category, we’re significantly down.” Mr. Crump said Phoenix’s most recent data for 2010 indicated still lower crime. For the first quarter of 2010, violent crime was down 17% overall in the city, while homicides were down 38% and robberies 27%, compared with the same period in 2009.

Arizona’s major cities all registered declines. A perceived rise in crime is one reason often cited by proponents of a new law intended to crack down on illegal immigration. The number of kidnappings reported in Phoenix, which hit 368 in 2008, was also down, though police officials didn’t have exact figures.

And just to head off the obvious straw man, 2008 was not somehow a peak year, it was actually well below historical levels.

I was forwarded an email today, and I can’t honestly figure out the source since it is one of those that has been forwarded a zillion times, but at some point it passed through the Arizona 2010 Project.  It consisted mainly of pictures of desert areas along major immigration routes that had been trashed by illegal immigrants.  This picture is pretty typical.

Certainly an ugly site, particularly for someone who lives and works in the outdoors as I do.

Here is a quote, I think from the original email but it may have been from one of the forwarders (emphasis added):

This layup is on an ‘illegal super – highway’ from Mexico to the USA (Tucson) used by human smugglers.

This layup area is located in a wash area approximately .5 of a mile long just south of Tucson.

We estimate there are over 3000 discarded back packs in this layup area. Countless water containers, food wrappers, clothing, and soiled baby diapers. And as you can see in this picture, fresh footprints leading right into it. We weren’t too far behind them.

As I kept walking down the wash, I was sure it was going to end just ahead, but I kept walking and walking, and around every corner was more and more trash!

And of course the trail leading out of the layup area heading NORTH to Tucson, then on to your town tomorrow.

They’ve already come through here. Is this America the Beautiful?  Or another landfill?

The trash left behind by the illegals is another of the Environmental Disasters to hit the USA. Had this been done in one of our great Northwest Forests or Seashore National Parks areas there would be an uprising of the American people……..but this is remote Arizona-Mexican border.

Well, it so happens my life is spent cleaning up public parks.  My company’s mission is to privately operate public parks.  A lot of that job is picking up and hauling away the trash.  And I can tell you something with absolute certainty:  This is exactly what a highly trafficked area in our great Northwest Forests or Seashore National Parks would look like if someone wasn’t there to pick up.  Here is one example from a northwest forest, in Oregon:

We run busy campgrounds and day use areas all over the country, and you would not believe the trash on the ground on a Monday morning.  And this is after the place was cleaned on Sunday morning and with trash cans available every 10 feet to throw things away correctly.  I have seen a few areas in the National Forest that were busy ad hoc camping areas — meaning they had no facilities, no staff, and no trash cans — and they were absolutely trashed by good old red-blooded American citizens.  Parts looked no different than this picture.  Most of these areas have since been closed, because of this ecological damage.

In fact, in my presentation I make to public agencies about our services, I say that we are actually in the environmental preservation business.  By attracting recreators to defined areas of the wilderness where we have staff to clean up after the visitors and limit their impact on nature, we are helping to preserve the other 99% of the land.

So, yes this is ugly, but it frustrates me that this is used to play into the Joe Arpaio type stereotypes of Mexicans

All these people that come over, they could come with disease. There’s no control, no health checks or anything. They check fruits and vegetables, how come they don’t check people? No one talks about that! They’re all dirty. I sent out 200 inmates into the desert, they picked up 18 tons of garbage that they bring in—the baby diapers and all that. Where’s everybody who wants to preserve the desert?”

To my mind, this is an argument against Mexican immigration in the same way that violence against women is used as an argument against legalizing prostitution.  Prostitutes suffer abuse in large part because their profession is illegal which limits their access to the legal system when victimized, not because violence is inherent to their profession.  Trash in a wash in the desert is a result of the illegality of immigration that forces people into stream beds rather than city check points when they enter the country.

Postscript #1: Please, if you are a good, clean, thoughtful user of public parks, do not write me thinking I have dissed you.  I have not.  Most of our visitors are great and thoughtful, and we really appreciate that.  But it takes only a few to make an unbelievable mess.

Postscript #2: I am willing to believe that poorly educated immigrants have fewer litter taboos than we have been acculturated with.   But I have seen enough to say that no ethnic group out there should be too smug.  For God sakes, there had to be a large effort near the top of Mt. Everest to clean up a huge dump that had accumulated of oxygen bottles and other trash near the summit.   Here are pictures of what rich Americans and Europeans do on Mt Everest when they are hiking and there is no trash can nearby:

Back in college, I burned a lot hotter on a variety of political issues.  I would argue with about anyone, and often did.  The dinner table was almost always the venue for some political fight.  During those arguments, I quickly discovered something — people nominally on my side of the argument were sometimes my biggest problem.  I remember any number of times telling some person to shut up and let me argue the point.  People email me all the time asking me to ban some idiot commenter trolling in opposition to all my posts.  I tell them I am much more likely to ban an idiot commenter nominally supporting my point than the other way around.

Which brings me to Eric Holder:

“I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the law. But I’m not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is,” Mr. Holder told the House Judiciary Committee.

This weekend Mr. Holder told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program that the Arizona law “has the possibility of leading to racial profiling.” He had earlier called the law’s passage “unfortunate,” and questioned whether the law was unconstitutional because it tried to assume powers that may be reserved for the federal government.

Rep. Ted Poe, who had questioned Mr. Holder about the law, wondered how he could have those opinions if he hadn’t yet read the legislation.

“It’s hard for me to understand how you would have concerns about something being unconstitutional if you haven’t even read the law,” the Texas Republican told the attorney general.

I have never been totally comfortable with the Democratic support of immigration anyway.  The party, particularly under this administration, seems to take the position that the government can be as authoritarian as it likes, as long as it does not discriminate racially in doing so.  This post hypothesizes that the Democrats’ support for immigration is political rather than principled, a desire to create the next new underclass that can be exploited for political points, and I can’t really disagree based on past history.

Readers know I support open immigration.  I see immigration restrictions as government licensing of who can and can’t work (and who can and can’t be hired) — an intrusion Conservatives would likely reject in any other context.  Since I am opposed to immigration limits, I am opposed to giving government extra powers in the name of enforcement, in the same way I oppose, say, asset seizure laws originally aimed at enforcement of drug prohibition.

I acknowledged that the law is less onerous in its amended form (because, you see, I actually read the whole thing, here and here for example), but what the law’s supporters fail to deal with in claiming the letter of the law will not be enforced in a racist manner is how even existing law is being enforced here in Phoenix by Joe Arpaio in a racist manner.  When Joe goes into a business, and handcuffs all the people with brown skin, releasing them only when a relative or friend races to the police station with a birth certificate, it is an ugly, un-American scene (here or here or here).  I would take supporters of the bill more at their word as to how the law will actually be used in practice if they were not the same people actively cheer-leading Joe Arpaio at every turn.

I have a new theory — that the most dangerous circumstances for individual liberty in this country are when Conservatives and Liberals agree.  When there is some issue where the authoritarianism of the right coincides with the authoritarianism of the left, then watch out.  The example I offer today is child molestation prosecutions, where the law and order Right meets the smug for-the-children moralizing of the Left.  Where Janet Reno meets Joe Arpaio.

Congrats to Tonya Craft for her acquittal, and here’s hoping (though there is not much chance) that the prosecutors and particularly that jackass of a judge suffer some sort of negative consequences from their outlandish abuse of due process.  My jury experience on a similar case here.

Update:  And speaking of Sheriff Joe…

Exclusionist Conservatives in Arizona are quick to defend themselves against charges of racism.  While I tend to be an pro-immigration hawk, I accept that there are issues, such as the conflict of immigration and the welfare state, where reasonable people can disagree as to solutions without any hint of racism charging the debate.  I really, really resist playing the race card on anyone.

However, if Conservatives really want to discourage charges of racism, they need to  stop playing on fears of immigrant crime as a main argument in their case (example from Expresso Pundit).  Such fears of minority group violence are part and parcel of every racist position in history.   The out-group is always vilified as criminal, whether it be blacks in the 60′s or Italians and Eastern Europeans earlier in the century or the Irish in the 19th century.

There is no evidence either recently or throughout history of immigrant-led crime waves, and in fact as I wrote the other day crime rates in Arizona are improving throughout this “invasion” at a faster rate than the US average. So when Conservatives grab a single example, such as the Pinal County shooting  (for which no suspects have been identified) as “proof” we need immigration reform, they are no different than Al Sharpton grandstanding based on the Tawana Brawley case  (and possibly these cases could be even more similar, update: or perhaps not).

Stop trying to manufacture a crime spree that does not exist.  Sure, illegal immigrants commit some murders.  So do every other group.  There is no evidence they commit such murders at a disproportionate rate.  And yes, I understand there are violent, paramilitary gangs roving Northern Mexico, which currently is in a state of chaos, that we really don’t want to spill over into Arizona.  But this has been a threat for years, and for all the fear, there is no evidence that they are somehow increasing their activities here.  And even if they were, laws that give Joe Arpaio additional power to harass day laborers in Phoenix are sure as hell not going to scare them off.

Via Valley Fever:

There is a report circulating right now, which — if true — confirms what many Arizona residents have been dreading for years: Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio will run for governor of the state of Arizona.

ABC 15 is reporting that Arpaio already has made the decision to take the plunge and will announce his candidacy on Monday.

According to “several high-ranking sources within the Sheriff’s Department,” all the necessary paperwork “has been filled out and is ready to file.”

Unfortunately, he may well win.  There are two things an outsider needs to know about people in Arizona

1. They have an insane, irrational fear of Mexican immigrants, who they see as disproportionately made up of gang lords who make Tony Soprano look like a pansy.  Of course, no one seems to have any actual personal experience with such violence or to be an actual victim, but they heard that the lady who put her cat in the microwave was threatened.
2. They believe that only Joe Arpaio has been standing between them and total annihilation at the hands of the brown-skinned hordes.

Yes, Arpaio is not only liked here, he is freaking beloved by a near majority of the population.  He is the single most potent Republican name in the state — one only has to look at the number of candidates seeking his endorsement.  For example, we have people running for the US Congress in this state who tout Arpaio’s endorsement on their every poster.  Think of that — US Congressmen running around seeking a sheriff’s endorsement.

Just check this out.  A local Republican privately thinks Arpaio is a dangerous idiot, but he still seeks his backing in the election

Bill Montgomery, the candidate for Maricopa County Attorney backed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, strongly questions Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s mental fitness and leadership ability in a secret tape made by county officials….

To Stapley [one of the county officials at the taped meeting], the Republican candidate made himself out to be a real Arpaio critic.

But, as we learned, Montgomery later teamed up with Arpaio in hopes of giving a boost to his campaign. Montgomery mailed a letter from Arpaio to the sheriff’s supporters a couple of weeks ago, in which Arpaio praises the candidate and pledges to help him get elected.

We sort of feel bad for Montgomery in this situation — no one likes to have a private conversation recorded without their knowledge. Yet getting beyond the ethics (and politics) of why the tape was made, Montgomery does come off looking fairly two-faced.

He’s willing to take every cent Arpaio can raise for him, yet described the sheriff to Stapley as kind of a dottering old fool.

He also said he’s not thrilled with Thomas’ monolithic focus on illegal immigration. Yet that focus, of course, is shared by Arpaio.

Fellow Arpaio-haters will love this:

Montgomery related how he’d been talking about serious issues during a meeting with Arpaio when the conversation suddenly turned to ”stories about his family, past Valentine’s Days, that sort of thing.”

An aide popped in to prompt the sheriff out of his daydreaming, and “it was a little bit like — I don’t want to disparage him — but a little bit like someone coming into a nursing home and saying visiting hours are over now.”

It is increasingly hard to have an immigration discussion here in Phoenix.  The vast majority of residents are absolutely convinced, despite evidence to the contrary, that they are in the middle of an apocalyptic version of the Mariel boatlift and have found themselves surrounded by Tony Montana’s ready to carve them up save for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s brave intervention.

You never meet anyone who has actually had a problem with immigrants, and most like the immigrants, even the illegal ones, they know.   The other night a friend of mine said that we were all victims – I asked, “how?”  Everyone seems to have stories of immigrant hijinx, but they are all like the stories of the lady who put her cat in a microwave — it happened to someone else.  And we do have stories of immigrant crimes on TV, but like shark attacks and extreme weather events, we overestimate their frequency because only certain outliers at the edges of the normal distribution get reported.

As an aside, one of the interesting things about the immigration debate for those of us who have read US history is how amazingly similar current arguments against particularly Mexican immigrants  (the commit crime, they don’t integrate, they take jobs from Americans) are identical to arguments used against the Irish, Italians, and most eastern Europeans at one time or another.   I heard a woman at a part a while back of Slav background talking about how here immigrant grandparents were different than these Mexicans.  I told her that the exact same arguments she was using were used against Easter Europeans in the early 20th century, and in fact, and in fact the first real immigration quotas in this country were meant to keep her ancestors out.

As a result, I tend to grab the pro-immigration side in debates, even though I think there are some sensible reasons it probably has to be restricted or restructured, just because I really don’t like the vibe coming from the immigration opponents around me.  When people take positions out of irrational fear and loathing, I am hugely reluctant to make any sort of common cause even if some of our concerns overlap.

Bruce McQuain argues that the main barrier to his advocating open immigration is the welfare state, and I am sympathetic to that argument.  I still, however, think we are smart enough to have a safety net and allow much more open immigration.  Bruce Pick has some sensible suggestions, and I published my own plan here.

And, as a final thought, the locals are never, ever going to convince me to their side when they trot Joe Arpaio up to the podium to make their case.  I have opposed the current immigration law in Arizona less because of any immigration issues and more because Joe does not need any more arbitrary authority.  I like what Radley Balko wrote the other day:

Dear Tea Partiers,

Ask Joe Arpaio to be your keynote speaker, and you’ve lost me.

He’s a power-mad thug with a badge, the walking, mouth-breathing antithesis of the phrase “limited government.”

Yes, this is but one state chapter in your movement. So distance yourself from them.

It’s one thing to have a few idiots and nutjobs show up at your rallies.

It’s quite another to invite one to speak.

Yours,

Radley Balko

More good stuff here.

Immigration is a thorny issue. But when we stand around and say “we don’t want you here”, I have to break ranks. When they say “these immigrants are damaging our economy”, I have to break ranks. I don’t have all the answers as to how to fix the problem, but I know that I refuse to close our country to people who want to live the American Dream. We have to enforce our laws, but when our laws are contrary to the very fabric of America, those laws need to change.

Conor Friedersdorf at Andrew Sullivan’s blog has a number of comments from Arizona readers about why, despite all his nuttiness and outright hostility to civil rights, Joe Arpaio just keeps on getting elected here in Phoenix.

One sample:

…Arpaio is media-savvy, and picks his enemies well.  By this I don’t mean his foes in county government or in the media, I mean the groups on whom he concentrates the resources of his office.  Last night, as every year about this time, all of the TV stations showed footage from this year’s deadbeat dad roundup, along with the smirking Sheriff talking about how terrible it was that kids were going to have a lousy Xmas because these deadbeat dads hadn’t been paying child support.  He also goes after animal cruelty cases with a vengeance.  I think he has a finely-tuned sense of which “others’ are particularly viewed with scorn by his target supporters, and goes after them with a vengeance.  There is no doubt that many Maricopa county residents feel safer as a result of his policies, but also equally that his policies are never designed to impact negatively those supporters who see themselves as law-abiding (and hence won’t ever be in jail), are white (and hence will never be racially profiled), and don’t fit into any of the other classes that he has singled out for opprobrium.

On a side topic, one commenter does take this out of context:

But let’s not forget we’re in a state that effectively voted by referendum NOT to honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the 90′s

The issue as I remember it was not of honoring Martin Luther King Jr. but of adding another paid holiday for state workers.  As I recall, Republicans readily agreed to a state holiday for MLK as long as government workers gave up one somewhere else on the calendar, so it wasn’t about MLK per se but about whether government employees should be allowed an extra paid day off.

When Sheriff Joe Arpaio does not have his deputies busy arresting anyone found driving while Mexican, he is showing his contempt for the legal process.  Another weird story just keeps getting weirder:

Defying a court order, Maricopa County detention officer Adam Stoddard said he would rather go to jail than apologize for swiping a defense attorney’s court file.Now it’s up Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe to follow through on his contempt of court finding against Stoddard and place him in jail.

However, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio – who runs the jails – has vowed to challenge the order if it comes down to that….

…when it appeared that Stoddard was not going to call a press conference for his public apology, he called an impromptu press conference at 8:30 p.m. tonight – to state that he wasn’t going to apologize.

If you missed it, Carlos Miller at the link above has the act of the deputy taking defense briefs off their table in court on video.

This is not the only example of the Sheriff going to extraordinary lengths to obtain information to which he has no right.  In an incredible and under-reported story, his armed posse actually stormed into the County offices and took over the computing center that contained emails he had been unable to obtain through court order.

Update:  Not sure I think too much of a judge’s order to issue a public apology, but that is another story.

It appears that our Maricopa County government (which is the county that Phoenix is in) has risen to new levels of dysfunctionality.  Apparently our Sheriff Joe Arpaio missed his calling as South American general, launching a coup last week against the rest of the county government (for whom he supposedly works).

Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies on Wednesday stormed into a county building, seized control of a computer system and threatened to arrest county employees if they tried to stop them, according to county officials.

County management responded by asking a Maricopa County Superior Court judge for a temporary restraining order against the Sheriff’s Office.

The system, which provides access to law-enforcement databases, is the subject of a lawsuit between the Sheriff’s Office and the Board of supervisors.

It links county computers to Department of Public Safety databases, which store criminal background information. But it also is a server and e-mail platform for several county agencies, including the Sheriff’s and County Attorney’s offices and the Superior Court.

Its management is the subject of a 2003 interagency agreement. But in light of recent layoffs of system operators due to budget cuts and squabbles among the agencies, the Sheriff’s Office felt that sensitive data that should be the sole domain of law enforcement had become too available to the system’s civilian administrators, who work for County Manager David Smith and the supervisors….

“The sheriff did not receive permission from – or give notice to – any other elected official or stakeholder agency before barging in with armed officers and demanding that he be given exclusive control,” he said.

It turns out that the Sheriff’s concern about protecting confidential information could well be a smokescreen.  For years, the Sheriff’s office has been, unsuccessfully, attempting to gain access via the courts to records and emails from other departments, information that, coincidentally, resides on the seized servers.

Just as the Sheriff’s Office is concerned about civilians’ access to records, county management is concerned the Sheriff’s Office now has access to information from other county agencies it is investigating, such as the Superior Court. State appellate courts have rebuffed Arpaio’s attempts to obtain privileged court e-mails, which would be accessible through the system. Superior Court Judge Joseph Heilman has scheduled a hearing for today regarding the restraining order.

… a debate between Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Al Sharpton certainly leaves me without a side to cheer for.

Our execrable sheriff Joe Arpaio conducted another of his famous roundups of people with brown skin.  This time descending on an area landscaping company, our brave deputies zip-tied anyone who did not look Anglo-Saxon.  To have their handcuffs removed, workers of Latin descent had to first provide proof that they were in the country legally.  Note that there is no legal requirement that I know of that workers in this country carry proof of citizenship at all times, on the off-chance the local Gestapo will descend on them and demand to see their papers.

Deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office raided a Mesa
landscaping company early Wednesday morning, arresting nearly three
dozen people suspected of being in the country illegally.

The raid on offices of Artistic Land Management, on Main Street just
west of Dobson Road, happened about 4:30 a.m., according to one worker
who was handcuffed and detained before being released when he produced
documentation that he was in the country legally….

Juarez estimated about 35 workers were handcuffed with plastic zip-ties
while deputies checked for documents. Those who could provide proof
they were in the country legally were released, while others were put
on buses and taken away.

Over the last week, I have heard about 20 commercials from our local prosecutor’s office informing me that there is a web site I can visit with pictures of drunk drivers.  Uh, why?  Is this supposed to somehow help me, driving down a street at night, such that I might just recognize the oncoming driver from 300 yards away, despite his headlights, as being someone I saw on the web site?

Actually, no.  The prosecutor believes that the criminal justice system does not impose harsh enough penalties, so he is using his office and public funds to add an additional penalty not specified by the court or the legislature: Public shaming.  I was happy to see that Reason picked up this issue today:

Taking Thomas at his word, he is imposing extrajudicial punishment,
based on his unilateral conclusion that the penalties prescribed by law
for DUI offenses provide an inadequate deterrent

In addition, Mr. Thomas is very likely emulating the example of our self-aggrandizing county Sheriff, Joe Arpaio.  Sheriff Joe has built a PR machine for himself at public expense, in large part through extra-legal get-tough-on-criminals show-campaigns like this one. 

Here in Phoenix we have a sheriff named Joe Arpaio.  Sheriff Joe, as sensitive to building his media image as he is to fighting crime, has built himself a reputation among the majority of voters that he is a tough-on-crime code-of-the-west kind of guy.  As the Phoenix New Times describes his image:

While voters lapped up the sheriff’s harsh approach to inmates in his
jails — from forcing them to wear pink underwear, to feeding them
oxidized, green bologna, to working them in chain gangs, to housing
inmates in tents — New Times
writers pointed out that the cruelty and violence in Arpaio’s lockups
prompted Amnesty International’s first investigation in America.

I, however, see Sheriff Joe as a shameless self-promoter, uncaring about basic civil rights, and a serial abuser of government power.  A number of Phoenix New Times (our free alt-weekly) reporters have been on Arpaio’s ass for years, dogging him in the best tradition of American media trying to hold public officials accountable.

In 2004, during an election cycle, reporter John Dougherty found that Arpaio had over a million dollars of investments in commercial real estate parcels.  Dougherty asked the question, how does a lifetime public official making $78,000 a year have so much real estate?  Arpaio could have replied that his family was independently wealthy or that he had parlayed his real estate investment from rags to riches.  Instead, Arpaio used an obscure law aimed at protecting the home addresses of government officials to remove access to any public records of his commercial real estate transactions at the same time he removed his home address from these data bases.  Instead of explaining where the money came from, he used his power to cover his tracks.

The cool thing about alt-weeklies is that they are feisty in a way that major newspapers used to be but are no longer.  The paper responded by publishing Arpaio’s home address in an editorial.  Ill-considered?  Perhaps, but the paper pointed to several public web site where Arpaio’s home address was already published, including several government sites.  Their point:  Arpaio’s concern about his home address was a smokescreen to mask the fact he was really trying to remove the records of his real estate investments.  If he had really been concerned about his home address being public, he would have removed it from all the other sites it appeared on, not just the data base he wished to purge of his commercial investments.  [update:  the law apparently bars publishing the address on the Internet, but not in other media.  The New Times is legally OK for publishing it in their print edition, but technically broke the law by having that print edition also appear on the web]

Joe Arpaio is never one to just "move on."  In response to the paper’s editorial, Joe Arpaio used the full force of his public office to form a grand jury to investigate the Phoenix New Times.  Via the grand jury, his prosecutor-buddy has slapped a really amazing subpoena on this small newspaper.  This first part is bad enough:

In a breathtaking abuse of the United States Constitution, Sheriff Joe
Arpaio, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, and their increasingly
unhinged cat’s paw, special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik, used the grand
jury to subpoena "all documents related to articles and other content
published by Phoenix New Times newspaper in print and on the Phoenix
New Times website, regarding Sheriff Joe Arpaio from January 1, 2004 to
the present."

Pretty broad scope, huh?  If the case were really about whether the paper broke any laws by publishing his address, they would just subpoena that particular editorial.  But this case appears to be about a lot more, specifically a chance by Sheriff Joe to finally punish the New Times for years of critical reporting.  But the subpoena goes even further, into total la-la land:

The subpoena demands: "Any and all documents containing a compilation
of aggregate information about the Phoenix New Times Web site created
or prepared from January 1, 2004 to the present, including but not
limited to :

A) which pages visitors access or visit on the Phoenix New Times website;

                                       

B) the total number of visitors to the Phoenix New Times website;

                                       

C) information obtained from ‘cookies,’ including, but not limited to,
authentication, tracking, and maintaining specific information about
users (site preferences, contents of electronic shopping carts, etc.);

D) the Internet Protocol address of anyone that accesses the Phoenix New Times website from January 1, 2004 to the present;

                                       

E) the domain name of anyone that has accessed the Phoenix New Times website from January 1, 2004 to the present;

                                       

F) the website a user visited prior to coming to the Phoenix New Times website;

                                       

G) the date and time of a visit by a user to the Phoenix New Times website;

                                       

H) the type of browser used by each visitor (Internet Explorer,
Mozilla, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, etc.) to the Phoenix New Times
website; and

I) the type of operating system used by each visitor to the Phoenix New Times website."

I am sorry to do this to you, but if you clicked through to the Phoenix New Times site via the links in this story, any personal information that is recoverable about you is now subject to this subpoena. 

For years I have argued against special privileges like shield laws for the press.  My point has always been that we should not create a special class of citizen with more or less rights.  And this case does not change my mind, for this reason:  We all should have protection against this kind of abusive and intrusive probing by a public official, not just the press.  The Phoenix New Times should not have to divulge the details of its readership, but neither should my blog or Jane Doe’s MySpace page.  This kind of prosecutorial fishing expedition against a critic of a government official is not wrong because it is directed at the press; it is wrong because it is directed at any American.

Update:  I didn’t get into all the really weird stuff.  For example, Joe Arpaio argued that publication of his home address was damaging because groups were out to assassinate him:

A Mexican drug cartel acting on behalf of the Minutemen through the
intercession of a pro-immigration rights radio talk show host intended
to assassinate Arpaio, according to a sheriff’s office investigation
detailed on the front page of the Sunday, October 7, edition of the Arizona Republic.

                                       

Now just think about this for a second. The Minutemen hate Mexicans
sneaking across the border. They are even less fond if the Mexicans are
smuggling drugs.

And we are supposed to believe that the Minutemen, seldom associated
with unexplained stashes of bling, agreed to a $3 million assassination
fee and put 50 percent down?

And that this was brokered by Elias Bermudez, a talk radio host, former
mayor of Mexican border town San Luis Rio Colorado in Sonora, and an
outspoken critic of Sheriff Arpaio — and, obviously, no fan of the
Minutemen?

And a key linchpin in this comic book farce was a teenage girl in a
prep school in Hartford, Connecticut, who was an exchange student at
one point in San Luis. If the drug cartel needed to contact the
Minutemen "for any reason," they could use a particular e-mail address
. . . which, as the officers discovered, belonged to a kid in a private
school.

And from the Arizona Republic, our mainstream paper that usually fawns over Arpaio:

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office spent an estimated $500,000
during the past six months protecting Joe Arpaio from an assassination
that supposedly was designed to cause a furor in the United States over
illegal immigration.

The convoluted plot, reported to police by a paid informant,
purportedly involved members of the Minuteman border group hiring a hit
squad from a Mexican drug cartel and using an outspoken
immigrant-rights advocate as their intermediary.

Sheriff’s officials now acknowledge that virtually none of the information supplied by the source panned out.

I’m sorry, but the person who dreams this stuff up has a huge burden of proof to even argue that he is sane, much less should be our sheriff.  The Minutemen love Sheriff Joe — they are peas in a pod.  They believe many of the same things.  The odds they would be trying to assassinate him are ZERO.  By the way, this is not the first time Arpaio dreamed up an assassination plot:

in 2003 … prosecutors took hapless James Saville to trial for
"plotting" to kill Arpaio. Jurors wound up deciding that deputies set
up the assassin, coaxing and entrapping him. Saville was acquitted ("The Plot to Assassinate Arpaio," August 5, 1999).

                                     
Then there was the time Arpaio identified a threat upon his life that
turned out to be an art student’s sculpture of a spider left upon his
lawn.

Update:  Joe Arpaio has arrested the owners of the Phoenix New Times paper for revealing the contents of the subpoena.

I thought the city of Washington DC had declared a "Crime emergency" because there was too much crime.  Apparently not, since they have created a whole new class of criminals:  16-year-olds who are … shudder … out and about after 10PM.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said yesterday that the city had to
set the new 10 p.m. curfew for youths 16 and younger because of
"irresponsible" parents who don’t control their children.

"You shouldn’t need a curfew if you’ve got parents who are
responsible," Ramsey said on Washington Post Radio. "But unfortunately
we’ve got some parents here that are totally irresponsible. Their idea
of raising a kid is throwing a kid out of the house and letting them
straggle back in at 2 o’ clock in the morning."

Hat tip to Reason’s Hit and Run, which had this comment:

It’s not that city officials want to play parent to every kid in the district. It’s just that, gosh, turns out law enforcement professionals are better parents.

I hate to think what ideas this will give our local stormtrooper Joe Arpaio, the Sheriff with the largest PR budget in the nation. 

Props by the way to Phoenix New Times reporter John Dougherty, whose longstanding reporting on Sheriff Joe is reminiscent of the tough, confrontational local reporting of old.  Of course, there’s no room for that in the milquetoast pander-to-the-local-pols reality of big-city newspapers today, so Dougherty is relegated to the local alternative paper (which may not be fair — I don’t know Mr. Dougherty — he may prefer to be where he is).   Sheriff Joe is popular here in Phoenix, so the Arizona Republic (the big paper here) panders to him rather than risk confronting a popular figure.  The fact that one of Sheriff Joe’s family helps run the Arizona Republic’s editorial page may also have something to do with it.