Pardoned Sheriff Joe Enabled Rapists

There are many reasons to hate Donald Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio. The simplest, of course, is that Arpaio’s crime was ignoring a federal court order, basically telling people that this supposed law and order president doesn’t care about law or order if he thinks it will keep his racist base closer to him. This wasn’t about law enforcement, and whatever your feelings may be about the immigration laws, Arpaio wasn’t enforcing them by using racial profiling. He was just illegally harassing people he did not like who would never vote for him. What he was doing was like doing a search for someone who bombed an abortion clinic by pulling over and hassling everyone coming out of a Catholic church. By the way, if he had done that, do you think we’d be talking about a presidential pardon right now?
But, let’s set that aside for a moment. Who is Sheriff Joe as the President calls him?
He is a man who did not care if children got raped. Let me repeat that because some of you — especially those supporting him — may either have conveniently forgotten this, genuinely did not know it, or just hate Latinos so much that you’re willing to look the other way. He did not care if children got raped.
From 2004 to 2007, Arpaio’s department botched or just plain ignored over 400 sex crimes. One of those crimes was the rape of a 13-year-old girl. He failed to arrest the suspect in that case, who then sexually assaulted the girl all over again. The man self-advertised as America’s toughest sheriff was too busy looking closely at every Hispanic person who walked by to be bothered having his deputies look for rapists. He was spending so much time proudly tracking down sources of green baloney he paid no attention to the fact that his ability to protect the people of Maricopa County had become nothing more than baloney.
The 13-year-old was a disabled girl raped by an uncle named Patrick Morrison. The girl told a teacher who made sure she was given a rape kit. Yes, traces of semen were found, but Arpaio’s office closed the case and never followed up because a man raping a 13-year-old was just not as important as continuing to score political points by concentrating on Latinos.
Morrison, knowing that Arpaio’s office did not care about rape — even of helpless children — went on raping the girl for four years. When that rape kit came back, the lab requested a blood sample from Morrison who had been identified by the girl as her attacker. Arpaio’s office did not think that was worth bothering with. That would be bad enough, but it was actually worse.
Even though they knew the rape kit came back positive, Arpaio’s department told the girl’s mother it did not, making the mom think the girl was lying. Arpaio’s department was in a word, evil, and frankly, complicit in this girl’s continued rape. Why did they lie to the mother? Probably because this was a department dedicated more to what got Sheriff Joe re-elected: which was rounding up gardeners and women cleaning puke and blood from hourly-rate Phoenix motel rooms.
Arpaio said his department did due diligence in finally getting around to the case, though it did only after Morrison impregnated the girl who was acting out so much after four years of victimization she ended up in a group home, where you and I would have ended up to if we were being raped by someone who threatened to kill us and even your mother did not believe you because the sheriff’s department said it was all a lie.
Maricopa County ended up paying out three and a half million dollars to the girl in a case her lawyer rightfully said could have been solved by an eighth grader, but that’s just a drop in a very ugly bucket. In over 20 years in office, Arpaio has had the county pay out nearly 70 million dollars in judgments, legal fees and settlements for everything from malfeasance to using county funds to conduct investigations of his political foes.
When the rape case was over, rather than apologize to the girl, Arpaio said her lawyer should stop attacking him and should start thanking his deputies for protecting everyone from the animals, but frankly, the ASPCA did a better job of that. Arpaio is the Chief Wiggum of sheriffs. Wiggum, of Simpsons fame, once sang “fighting crime is not my cup of tea.” For Arpaio, investigating any violence was like poison to him.
The thing he hated investigating the most, however, were sex crimes. Under Sheriff Joe, women had no protection at all from sexual assault, especially if the victim was here illegally. Then it was like the crime never happened. I take if he felt they got what was coming to them. In El Mirage, Arizona alone — a city of 32,000 people — Arpaio ignored 32 reported child molesting cases, even though the suspect was known in 26 of those cases
Wait, there’s more to show what a cream puff America’s toughest sheriff actually is. He had declared solved cases of a 14-year-old girl raped by schoolmates and a 15-year-old raped by 2 strangers, even though they weren’t solved because no one was arrested. In the case of the 14-year-old, Arpaio gave up because — and I’m not making this up — the suspect refused to present himself for questioning. By the way, in that case the rape was videotaped, but since the girl was drunk, once again, Arpaio and company decided she was asking for it. This is, of course, only true for girls. If a drunk tourist got assaulted and wandered into a crime ridden neighborhood, he’d be a victim.
In the case of the girl raped by strangers, Arpaio closed the case before the DNA results came back.
And that was something Arpaio did over and over and over. His department closed cases without even trying to solve them, just so they could say the cases were closed.
While Arpaio was making political hay over immigrants, his department was closing only 15% of its cases by arrest. New York City, just for example, in violent crime, clears 62%.
Arpaio had five detectives who investigated sex crimes, something like the SVU unit you see on Law and Order. However, he had two of those detectives transferred to work on a credit card fraud case involving the Arizona Diamondbacks and a fraud case in Fountain Hills, where he lives.
When the continuing scandals about sex crimes finally made headlines, Arpaio was given $600,000 by Maricopa County to hire six more detectives. No detectives were hired and Arpaio’s department had no explanation of where the money went.
In the case for which Arpaio was pardoned, he was rounding up people with no reasonable suspicion that they had committed a crime or were in the country illegally. Mind you, when you round up Hispanics in Arizona you are rounding up many people whose families were there long before Joe Arpaio’s family. Long before.
Arpaio has wasted taxpayer funds on political feuds resulting in more lawsuit settlements. He has violated elections laws, and the County Office of Management and Budget found he has misspent more than 100 million dollars in just five years time including expensive meals, luxury hotels and pleasure trips to Alaska and Disneyland.
He even, and this is true, entrapped a man in a phony assassination plot, which his deputies set up and bought the bomb parts for, just to make Arpaio look sympathetic for re-election. The guy they set up could have spent 20 years in prison before investigators told the prisoner’s defense team how he was set up. That cost the county another 1.6 million dollars.
He also wasted time and what he calls his cold case posse to continue the ridiculous claim that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was forged, even though the idea that his mother would have somehow gotten birth announcements in the Honolulu newspapers for the purpose of getting a black child elected president some day is idiotic on its face. The year Obama was born was the year we needed to pass a federal civil rights act because it wasn’t possible for blacks to even vote in many places, much less think of being president.
Arpaio is a crook and a con man. There are rapists walking the streets because of him. Trump mentioned that one reason Arpaio would get a pardon is because he is a vet. I’m happy he served, but it’s not like he committed his crimes because he suffered from PTSD in action or that he was heroic. He served in a medical unit in France while others were fighting the Korean War. That should not be a strike against him, but it certainly was no reason to pardon him. Hell, Lee Harvey Oswald was a Marine.
Arpaio got a pardon because he supported Trump. It was politics, and because he excites the same crowd of racists who would rather see Hispanics rousted even if they are not suspected of being here undocumented than rounding up people who rape children.
What was Trump’s question? Do I like Sheriff Joe? No. But that should not matter either. This is the question: did he deserve a pardon? Emphatically no.
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