During a speech to a group of police officers in July, President Trump returned to one of his favorite themes of the campaign season: violence. “Please don’t be too nice” to the “thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon,” Trump advised the officers. Be “rough.”
The president’s endorsement of police brutality was met with applause from the officers and shock from activists and pundits alike.
Sensing the brewing backlash, the White House insisted that the president was simply making a joke. Even Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the country’s top law enforcement official — a man with his own complicated history of encouraging the worst impulses of the police — attempted to distance himself from the controversy.
Yet the president just proved that when it comes to endorsing police brutality, especially against communities of color, he’s dead serious.
For more than 20 years, Joe Arpaio, former Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona terrorized Latino communities, harassed immigrants, and made life a living hell for prisoners in his care in order to build a reputation as “America’s toughest sheriff”.
These systematic violations of human and constitutional rights eventually landed Arpaio in legal trouble of his own. Then President Trump pardoned him.
Arpaio had been awaiting sentencing for a July conviction of criminal contempt.
Back in 2011, a federal judge ordered Arpaio to stop targeting and detaining Latinos just to inquire about their…