"America's Toughest Sheriff"

[Canuck_Buck]

The U.S. Justice Department said in a letter delivered Tuesday to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio that the investigation will focus on alleged patterns of discrimination based on a person's national origin.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,508586,00.html

Arpaio told The Associated Press that he will cooperate with the Justice Department.

Arpaio, who describes himself as "America's Toughest Sheriff" and is best known for feeding jail inmates green bologna sandwiches, clothing them in pink underwear, and making them work on chain gangs, received praise for his anti-immigration efforts from many who believe the federal government isn't doing enough to remove people in the U.S. illegally.

But his raids and sweeps of illegal immigrants in Phoenix and nearby Guadalupe have drawn protests from community leaders and civil liberties advocates. Arpaio, a Republican, has also been criticized for letting thousands of felony warrants go unserved while he chased illegal immigrants.

According to the Arizona Department of Public Safety, there are about 59,000 outstanding, unserved felony warrants in the state. The majority are in Maricopa County, the state's most populated county.

....is it me or does this sound like he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't do anything?[8D]

[CalHunter]

The article is somewhat misleading in that just about any department or jurisdiction will have quite a few "unserved" warrants and many that cannot be served because of bad ID, bad addresses, the people have moved out of the jurisdiction without any forwarding address information, etc.

An unserved warrant is obviously one that hasn't been served but the term (and article) doesn't reference if there have been attempts made to serve those warrants (last known address of suspect, etc.) and how many of those warrants are in fact multiple warrants for the same person (yes, this does happen).

The article also doesn't mention if there are ID problems with some of the warrants (i.e. somebody lied to the police, court, etc. and gave a false name that is on a warrant, etc.). And, last but certainly not least, the article doesn't cover if all of the agencies have the manpower to conduct warrant sweeps to find all of the miscreants.

The 2005 mid-term census data shows almost 6 million people live in Arizona with about 3.6 million living in Maricopa County. Depending on whose data you read, Arizona has anywhere from 15% to 29% "migrant" (read probably illegal) people from Mexico. Most of those people will not have any valid or usable ID for obvious reasons (like they would get deported). This obviously complicates the task of serving any warrants on migrants.

This article contains interesting information but it's still missing too much information to draw the inferred conclusion the article tries to make.