Isn’t this the cutest story you ever did hear?
Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Friday responded to news that he is the target of a new recall campaign, blasting out a frantic email to his supporters asking for money to help fend off the challenge.-
“Just three weeks after I was sworn into office for a sixth term as Maricopa County Sheriff, a group of radical extremists filed a recall campaign to forcibly remove me from office,” Arpaio wrote. “This is very serious.”
On Wednesday, activists from the Respect Arizona coalition filed registration paperwork officially kicking off a campaign to remove the controversial sheriff from his post. While they’ll need 300,000 signatures to trigger the recall election, leaders of the group have experience in the form of a successful 2011 effort to topple Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce (R), who was widely regarded as the architect of the state’s highly controversial SB 1070 immigration law.
Organizers of the Arpaio recall effort erected a website that calls for a new sheriff “that respects families, respects immigrants and respects Latinos.”
Arpaio has drawn national scrutiny for his harsh record on immigration enforcement, including federal allegations and other lawsuits accusing him civil rights violations and racial profiling. Complaints have also been raised over a number of deaths at his notorious jail tent cities, as well as his alleged mishandling of hundreds of sex abuse cases in Maricopa County.
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Arpaio, who crushed his opponents in 2012 by raising $8.5 million, asks for a maximum per-person contribution of $430 to help him battle back against the group, which he calls “clowns,” or “small band of thugs,” or “radical extremist forces.”
The words ‘clown’, ‘thug’ and radical extremist go a really long way in describing the sheriff because of his long record of abuses while in office.
In a strongly worded critique of the country’s best-known sheriff, the Justice Department on Thursday accused Sheriff Joe Arpaio of engaging in “unconstitutional policing” by unfairly targeting Latinos for detention and arrest and retaliating against those who complain.
After an investigation that lasted more than three years, the civil rights division of the Justice Department said in a 22-page report that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which Mr. Arpaio leads, had “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency.” The department interfered with the inquiry, the government said, prompting a lawsuit that eventually led Sheriff Arpaio and his deputies to cooperate.
“We have peeled the onion to its core,” said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, noting during a conference call with reporters on Thursday morning that more than 400 inmates, deputies and others had been interviewed as part of the review, including Sheriff Arpaio and his command staff. Mr. Perez said the inquiry, which included jail visits and reviews of thousands of pages of internal documents, raised the question of whether Latinos were receiving “second-class policing services” in Maricopa County.
Let us hope he is booted out of office as quickly as possible.
