Racist sheriff must face shame in court

Athorough moral and political indictment of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., would spill far beyond this page. It would catalog the years of racial profiling, the tormenting of immigrants and Hispanics, the physical mistreatment and humiliation of inmates and defendants, the beatings and neglect and deaths behind bars, the abuses of office — withholding records, harassing and persecuting elected officials and journalists, failing to investigate hundreds of unsolved sex crimes, squandering taxpayer funds on crime sweeps and “posses” and looney-tune vendettas, such as the mission to expose President Barack Obama’s supposedly forged birth certificate.

The actual criminal indictment he faces is a lot simpler. On Monday, federal officials charged him with contempt of court. If the sheriff is found guilty at a misdemeanor level, he could go to jail for six months.

The federal judge in a long-running racial-profiling lawsuit had told Arpaio and his chief deputy in 2011 to stop abusing Hispanics by pulling them over on suspicion of being in the country illegally, in the absence of any other charges. That is, for the sheriff to stop acting as a federal immigration agency unto himself.

This the sheriff did not do, according to the indictment.

Arpaio, who is running for a seventh term, says he is innocent. He insists he won’t give up, won’t take a plea deal, won’t resign. In an unsurprising play at victimhood, he accused the feds of “a blatant abuse of power,” of applying a different standard of justice to a lonely lawman who, in his words, “dares enforce the rule of law.”

Does he think the government is that stupid? Arpaio’s record of lawlessness speaks for itself; to grasp its sheer size, visit the website of the American Civil Liberties Union, a party to the racial-profiling lawsuit, or review the reporting by the newspaper in Mesa, Ariz., that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. “Contempt” is a fitting word for this long-overdue prosecution — not just contempt for the court, but for the people, civil order and justice.

That is the reason Arpaio is a hero to Donald Trump, who is running to rid the country of Mexican “rapists” and refugee “terrorists.” Trump has promised a regime of racist policing that terrorizes immigrants and their families. What Trump envisions, Arpaio embodies.

The Arpaio trial is to begin in December, after the election. If Maricopa County’s voters finally wake up — and a recent poll hints at the possibility — the sheriff will be voted out of office. If convicted, he will be punished, but probably not as harshly as he has punished and demeaned those in his custody. He will not be marched in shackles and prison stripes through the streets of Phoenix, for TV cameras; he will not be issued pink underwear and fed rancid meat. He will not be confined outdoors in suffocating heat. For his many thousands of victims, his humiliation in court will have to be enough.

Joe Arpaio