Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio may be the most despicable law enforcement officer in the country. A Justice Department legal complaint against his office alleges widespread constitutional violations and mistreatment of Latinos, including an alleged assault against a pregnant Latina woman, widespread racial profiling and use of racial slurs, and incidents where “female Latina [limited English proficiency] prisoners have been forced to remain with sheets or pants soiled from menstruation because of [the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's] failure to ensure that detention officers provide language assistance in such circumstances.”

He also may not be sheriff much longer, as an effort to recall Arpaio already collected 120,000 of the 335,000 signatures needed to force a recall election.

A bill that passed the GOP-controlled Arizona House of Representatives could make Arpaio very difficult to defeat, however. Currently, a recalled official in Arizona faces a single election that could include challengers from their own party. The GOP bill would change this process so that the parties would choose their candidates in a primary election, and then Arpaio would likely face the winner of the Democratic primary in the general election.

The reason why this change matters is because Maricopa County is very Republican — Romney won the county by nearly 12 points — so it would be difficult for a Democrat to defeat Arpaio in a one-on-one race. At the same time, Maricopa’s Democratic voters could potentially join with a minority of the county’s Republicans in order to elect a Republican challenger to Arpaio. Indeed, this is exactly what happened when Democrats joined with some Republicans to remove anti-immigrant Senate President Russell Pearce (R) and replace him with Republican challenger Jerry Lewis in a 2011 recall election.

In other words, it may be the case that a majority of Maricopa’s voters want to remove Arpaio, and thus he could lose a recall election under the current rules. Under the GOP House’s bill, however, Arpaio would likely have a clear shot to survive the recall election so long as a majority of the county’s Republicans vote for him in the primary election.

A group behind the effort to recall infamous Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpiao says it has gathered roughly one-third of the signatures required for a recall election.

So far, Respect Arizona has collected 120,000 of the 335,000 signatures needed by the May 30 cut-off date. The petition reads:

“We believe Sheriff Arpaio has failed to fulfill his duties as Maricopa County’s top law enforcement official. We believe Sheriff Arpaio has violated our trust and dignity as citizens because too many people have suffered as a result of Sheriff Arpaio’s abusive practices and policies. We believe business owners should not be unfairly harassed, workers unlawfully detained and families unjustly torn apart. We believe too many lawsuits have been filed and too many lives have been lost. We believe our children deserve a Sheriff that respects families, immigrants and Latinos. We believe Sheriff Arpaio should respect, defend and protect the rights guaranteed under the US Constitution because no one — not even a Sheriff — is above the law. No election victory can excuse or make right the unlawful acts that have occurred under Sheriff Arpaio’s leadership.”

Arpaio is best known as an anti-Latino, anti-immigration sheriff. Some of his antics include arming deputies with automatic weapons to prevent so-called “illegals” from escaping and recruiting Steven Segal to train vigilantes. He has also battled several lawsuits alleging he misused government funds and violated civil rights.

As the recall effort gains ground, Arpaio’s supporters are not idling. His Tea Party backers have named Arpaio’s opponents “domestic terrorists,” and formed “shadow armies” to combat the recall, placing volunteers in areas where Respect Arizona will gather signatures.

Last month, Maricopa County, Arizona’s notoriously anti-immigrant Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced that he would send armed “posses” to patrol schools in the wake of the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre. Arpaio’s band of armed volunteers, which now includes nearly 3,500 members, includes many people with criminal pasts.

Arizona residents can rest assured, however, that this band of armed vigilantes will not be sent out into the field without training. Rather, Arpaio will offer them the best preparation a washed up 1990s action star can provide:

Steven Seagal, 60, star of “Above the Law” and “Under Siege,” will lead members of the Arizona sheriff’s volunteer posse through a simulated school shooting today.

The volunteer posse, which is nearly 3,500-strong, has been used to patrol shopping malls during the holiday season and scope out undocumented immigrants, and now Arpaio plans to have them patrol areas surrounding schools in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, which includes Phoenix.

“Volunteers will learn operating procedures on how to handle one, two and three shooter scenarios as well as room entry tactics and hand to hand combat,” the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.

Arpaio said last month that some of his vigilante school patrol will carry automatic weapons.

America’s craziest sherriff, Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio, has announced plans to use money seized from drug dealers to arm his deputies with automatic weapons. Speaking to local television station 3TV on Wednesday, Arpaio said “thanks” to “dope dealers” for providing him the money to acquire unnecessary deadly weapons:

VOLENTINE: Why don’t you already have automatic weapons?

ARPAIO: We do have some, but everybody does not. I’m trying to get 500 weapons more to arm all our deputies.

VOLENTINE: How difficult will that be?

ARPAIO: It’s not going to be difficult. I’m going to use money that we seized from dope peddlers. So, I’m going to thank them for helping arm our deputies.

Watch it:

Arpaio’s “free guns for everyone!” strategy is a recipe for getting bystanders killed. During a shootout outside the Empire State Building last August, all nine civilians injured were hit by stray bullets fired by handgun-wielding police officers. Average police accuracy, according to data from the New York and Los Angeles police departments, ranges from 18 to roughly 30 percent. Those numbers are so low despite extensive police training with handguns because of the inherently unpredictable human response to life-or-death situations. So simply providing officers with exponentially more deadly automatic weapons without first requiring an extensive training regimen, as Arpaio appears to be proposing, is a recipe for deadly accidents.

There’s also reason to believe the Maricopa County deputies in particular shouldn’t be trusted with automatic weapons. Arpaio has instructed his deputies to use automatic weapons against undocumented immigrants who are “attempting to escape.” The Maricopa County department is under investigation by the Department of Justice Civil Rights division for systematic discrimination against Latinos. And Arpaio responded to the recent shooting in Newtown, Connecticut by sending armed civilian posses with “questionable pasts” into public schools.

Finally, the notion of using profits from drug arrests to fuel the militarization of police forces is uniquely dangerous. This practice, known as “asset forfeiture,” has become a way to make our violent and counterproductive “war on drugs” self-sustaining: police get huge windfalls for making drug busts, which they then use to buy bigger guns and invest in more anti-drug policing. Moreover, as Radley Balko notes, “Asset forfeiture not only encourages police agencies to use resources and manpower on drug crimes at the expense of violent crimes, it also provides an incentive for police agencies to actually wait until drugs are on the streets before making a bust.”

A week after the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio survived a reelection campaign that spotlighted his flagrant anti-Latino practices and misuse of government funds, the Maricopa County enforcer is back to work making “every effort” to target undocumented immigrants.

In a press release issued by his office yesterday, Arpaio touted several recent operations to chase down ”suspected illegal aliens” that involved violence, injuries and some smuggled marijuana. And he is pledging to escalate this effort by arming all of his deputies with automatic weapons:

During one of the investigations on Wednesday of this week, Sheriff’s deputies tried to approach a vehicle they had observed at a high rate of speed, when the vehicle sped away, going off road driving through a barb-wire fence into the desert. The suspect vehicle sustained damage to include flat tires but continued to drive for about one mile before eight occupants, including the driver, fled on foot into the thick brush. Immediately deputies created a perimeter and with the use of the Sheriff’s helicopter and K-9 units, they located one suspect hiding in a backyard of a residence and all others hiding in a wash. [...]

Sheriff Joe Arpaio says, “Once again the entry into Maricopa County from Mexico by illegal aliens does not seem to have subsided by evidence of numerous arrests made by my deputies. Aside from their determination to get away we will continue to make every effort to pursue and apprehend human smugglers as well as drug traffickers. More and more illegal aliens are attempting to escape which places my deputies in dangerous positions. In the near future I will be issuing automatic weapons for all my deputies”.

Setting aside the savage tone of the press release, Arpaio’s boast of expending vast county police resources to chase down individuals in the desert is misplaced at best. While Arpaio continues to “make every effort” to snag these individuals through violent means, less local police resources are available for addressing violent and property crimes. Instead, he is increasing the risk of violence going forward by pledging to arm all of his deputies with automatic weapons.

What’s more, Arpaio’s aggressive efforts put him and his department at risk of becoming the target of yet another lawsuit. This past June, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear in striking down many of the most controversial provisions of Arizona’s immigration law that immigration enforcement is primarily the purview of the federal government. While the court left in place one controversial provisions that requires police to ask individuals about their immigration status pursuant to an otherwise lawful police stop, the five-justice majority left the door wide open for a later lawsuit challenging improper enforcement of this provision once the law went into effect.

[h/t @TedHesson]

For the second time in as many weeks, election officials in Maricopa County, Arizona are in hot water for providing Hispanic voters with false information about when election day is.

Last week, ThinkProgress reported on how Maricopa County Elections Department officials attached a document to voter registration forms that gave the wrong date for anyone reading it in Spanish. The English version of the same document provides the correct date — November 6 — next to “8 de Noviembre.”

At the time, county officials dismissed the error as a clerical mistake, saying that only 50 people received the incorrect document. But a local ABC News affiliate has uncovered at least one more incident of the wrong date being disseminated in Spanish by Maricopa’s Elections Department.

Paper bookmarks found in three separate election counters throughout the county again give November 8th as election day, and again the mistake is reserved to just the Spanish version of the document. Activists who were perhaps willing to overlook the first incident as a genuine mistake are no longer keeping quiet:

Randy Parraz, President of Citizens For A Better Arizona, says the blame lies squarely with Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell.
“It shows she’s incompetent and not qualified,” said Parraz.
[...]
“The moment you found the first problem, there should have been an inventory,” said Parraz, referring to the voter ID document. “Anyone with common sense would have done an inventory on everything that’s been printed to catch this.”

Maricopa County happens to be the home of the controversial and xenophobic Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has led the nation’s most anti-Latino police force for years.

The family of a woman who died after her custody at Maricopa County Jail is suing the office of the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, alleging authorities neglected her and deprived her of necessary medications for days, allowing her to slip into a diabetic coma.

The local ABC affiliate reports on the circumstances that led to Deborah Braillard’s death, after she was detained for a minor drug possession charge:

Witness[es] said that Deborah was constantly moaning and crying out in pain, asking for help, repeatedly vomiting, defecating on herself and having seizures.

“She would shake. Her body would stiffen up,” said Tamela Harper, an inmate in the jail with Braillard. “They never did anything to help her.”

Inmates said they begged officers to do something.

“They were telling everyone, ‘There’s nothing we can do about it. This is jail. Get over it,”’ Harper said.

Harper added that officers said Braillard was “kicking drugs” and that she was “getting what she deserved.”

Medical reports would later prove the guards were wrong.

As the trial begins, ABC15 Arizona says a series of reports will “shed light on what experts call a broken system inside Maricopa County jails that has led to needless deaths and tens of millions of taxpayer dollars paid out in lawsuits.” The family’s lawyer, Michael Manning, has won six other lawsuits against the Sheriff’s Office for jail-related deaths, and calls conditions there “deplorable.”

And Arpaio faces several lawsuits alleging racial profiling, including one on behalf of a class of Latinos, and another by the Department of Justice, which alleges a slate of grievous practices targeting Latinos, from assaulting pregnant women and ignoring rape, to random, unlawful detention of Latinos and use of racial slurs.

Last last week, the Department of Justice announced it closed a criminal investigation against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio without deciding to bring criminal charges. Although Arpaio is best known for his harsh anti-immigrant practices and for widespread allegations of anti-Latino racism, the closed investigation dealt with relatively minor allegations. One subject of the investigation was whether Arpaio’s office misused county credit cards. Another was whether Arpaio spent public funds earmarked for one purpose on different, unrelated projects. The most serious allegation at issue in the now-dropped investigation involved a politically-motivated prosecution against two officials and a judge who were at odds with Arpaio.

Unsurprisingly, Arpaio celebrated DOJ’s announcement with a gloating press conference, declaring that federal officials “cleared my office of any abuse of power or wrongdoing that has been going on for years, and publicized almost every week for three years by the news media and critics.” His celebration is premature. Here’s why Arpaio should not break out the champagne yet:

• DOJ’s Civil Rights Case Against Arpaio Remains Live: Many of the most serious allegations against Arpaio are encompassed by the Justice Department’s civil rights lawsuit against the anti-immigrant sheriff. DOJ’s complaint details systemic lawlessness and abuse of Latinos by Arpaio and his officers, including forcing women prisoners to sleep in their own menstrual blood, an alleged assault against a pregnant woman, and widespread racial profiling and use of racial slurs.
• The Criminal Investigation Against Arpaio Began Under Bush: When he is not touting discredited claims that President Obama’s birth certificate is fake, Arpaio likes to dismiss the Obama Administration’s charges against him as “a political witch hunt.” Unfortunately for Arpaio, DOJ’s criminal investigation against him began under George W. Bush.
• Arpaio’s Allies Have Not Escaped Accountability: Although DOJ decided not to bring federal criminal charges against Arpaio or his allies for politically motivated prosecutions, Arizona courts have not been so kind. Former Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, a top Arpaio ally, was disbarred for targeting the same political enemies at issue in the DOJ probe.