Posted by
Steve on Friday, December 16, 2011 8:46:40 AM
Yesterday the Department of Justice put out a report on Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department. They took three years to investigate the department. After a three year investigation, they had to come up with something.
The report says that during the Sheriff’s Office sweeps for illegals, they use racial profiling. The person writing the report said the racial profiling was the worse he had seen. The Department of Justice has given the Sheriff’s Office three months to address the problems.
First, let me say that anything that comes out of Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is suspect. They could not find voter harassment when it was caught on video. The Bush Justice Department had successfully prosecuted that case up until the election. After the election, the case got dismissed. For this Justice Department to say that anyone else has problems is laughable.
Second, the sweeps for illegals are going to necessarily find people of Mexican and South American descent in large numbers. We are close to the Mexican border. Most people crossing the Mexican border illegally are from Mexico or a country further south. They generally speak Spanish and have trouble with English. There are certain characteristics that they have in common. If you look for those characteristics you will have greater success than the random actions like the TSA uses. So, yes there was racial profiling going on during the sweeps. Did some of the officers go over the line a time or two? Probably, but no department of any size has all officers who are clean as the wind driven snow. There are always some bad apples in every group of any size. Were mistakes made? Undoubtedly, mistakes are made by humans all the time. It is the nature of humans to make mistakes.
A comment made by Jim Sharp of Sharp in the Morning on KFYI struck me as profound as I got out of my car this morning. He said, “If the problems were really that bad, they would most likely have filed a lawsuit right away. They filed a lawsuit against Arizona for much less than this.” That is true. I am sure they found some problems. But the problems were such that they can be corrected with some minimal action by the Sheriff.
The predictable groups are calling for Sheriff Joe to resign as Sheriff. But, they say that almost every day over nothing. They would have said that he should resign if the report had said that the Sheriff’s Department had made no errors. The predictable groups are all progressive Democrat groups. They are not representative of the general public. They are representative of the Democrat Party from Washington, not Arizona.
Sheriff Joe said that he will continue to act as a Sheriff should in Arizona. He accused the Obama administration of wanting to hang a pink sign on the border welcoming all illegals and saying that this is your country. That pretty much sums up the Obama immigration policy in just a few words. Leave it to Sheriff Joe to summarize Obama’s entire immigration policy in one sentence.
Sheriff Joe will have to jump through some hoops to satisfy the Department of Justice or he will be unable to do his job. So, he will probably send Deputies to some lame training program to satisfy the Department of Justice and retain his ability to fight crime. That is a shame because it is an entire waste of taxpayer money just to be politically correct. These classes will most likely be taught by the progressive far left groups that want Sheriff Joe removed from office.
Soon, age will do what Democrats have wanted to do since Sheriff Joe was elected Sheriff. Sheriff Joe is, I believe, at least 70 years old. He will probably only run one more time before he will need to retire. That will be a huge loss for Arizona and the country. I hope whoever follows Sheriff Joe is at least half as good.