The U.S. Justice Department has been seeking an agreement requiring Arpaio’s office to train officers in how to make constitutional traffic stops, collect data on people arrested in traffic stops and reach out to Latinos to assure them that the department is there to also protect them.
Arpaio has denied the racial profiling allegations and has claimed that allowing a court monitor would mean that every policy decision would have to be cleared through an observer and would nullify his authority.
DOJ officials told a lawyer for Arpaio on April 3 that the lawman’s refusal of a court-appointed monitor was a deal-breaker that would end settlement negotiations and result in a federal lawsuit.
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The “notice of intent to file civil action” came Wednesday from Assistant U.S. Attorney General Thomas Perez in a letter to an Arpaio lawyer.
Perez, who heads the DOJ’s civil rights division, noted that it’s been more than 100 days since the sheriff’s office received the DOJ’s findings report and federal authorities haven’t met with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office counsel since Feb. 6 to discuss the terms of a consent agreement.
At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Arpaio defended himself in the face of the pending lawsuit.
“If they sue, we’ll go to court. And then we’ll find out the real story,” he said. “There’s lots of miscommunication emanating from Washington. They broke off communications.
“They’re telling me how to run my organization. I’d like to get this resolved, but I’m not going to give up my authority to the federal government. It’s as simple as that,” Arpaio added.
Last December, the DOJ released a scathing report accusing Arpaio’s office of racially profiling Latinos, basing immigration enforcement on racially charged citizen complaints and punishing Hispanic jail inmates for speaking Spanish in Arizona’s most populous county.
The DOJ also accused Arpaio of having a culture of disregard for basic constitutional rights.
The civil rights allegations have led some Arpaio critics to call for his resignation, including the National Council of La Raza, a prominent advocacy group for Latinos.
The sheriff’s office also is facing criticism over more than 400 sex-crimes investigations — including dozens of alleged child molestations — that hadn’t been investigated adequately or weren’t examined at all over a three-year period ending in 2007.
Arpaio has apologized for the botched cases, reopened 432 sex-crimes investigations and made 19 arrests.
Separate from the civil rights probe, a federal grand jury has been investigating Arpaio’s office on criminal abuse-of-power allegations since at least December 2009. That grand jury is examining the investigative work of the sheriff’s anti-public corruption squad.
The self-proclaimed toughest sheriff in America has been a national political fixture who has built his reputation on jailing inmates in tents and dressing them in pink underwear, selling himself to voters as unceasingly tough on crime and pushing the bounds of how far local police can go to confront illegal immigration.
What merit can any rational, independent thinking individual possibly assign to a case brought by a Federal law enforcement department which is itself deeply involved in criminal activity and a concerted effort to conceal through the willful withholding of information and documents subpoenaed by Congress. My granddaddy would I believe refer to this as ‘a case of the pot calling the kettle black.’
What this suit is really about, IMHO, is an attempt by the Holder Dept. of Criminal Injustice to draw attention away from itself, from its own criminal culpability, by trying to focus public attention on the politically charged issue of illegal immigration. Which is yet another area of Federal law enforcement that the Obama administration has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of resolve to enforce existing laws.
So what we really have then is an administration that has acted criminally and/or turned a blind eye to violations of Federal law while simultaneously attacking a state’s law enforcement efforts; efforts that by most accounts have been exemplary with respect to addressing the very real problem of illegal immigration, enforcement of which the Federal government has the responsibility to see to but refuses to do.
This is clearly arrogance and hypocrisy on a scale never before exhibited by any administration. The Obama administration is undoubtedly the most ‘transparently’ criminal rouges gallery to ever inhabit the dismal swamp that once was the Capital of our once great nation.
- – can we ‘hear’ an AMEN for patriotjohn????!!!!??? I just posted patriotjohn’s response on Facebook!! (Perhaps I’d better go out and purchase a gun!!)