Is Sheriff Penzone as bad as Arpaio? Hardly

I became an accidental adversary to Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 1997. A close friend asked me to take over, as a fixer-upper, his wrongful death/civil rights case resulting from the gruesome jailhouse death of his son. It was the Scott Norberg case.

That case settled for $8.25 million after we uncovered evidence that 10 of Arpaio’s jailers started the assault, kicked in Scott’s throat and choked him to death. They then destroyed evidence of their guilt and altered other evidence, all while Internal Affairs officers covered up for Arpaio.

The next 15 cases we did against Arpaio and his MCSO were not accidents. There were more gruesome death cases, civil rights cases and abuse of power cases. His victims in those cases included, among others, judges, newspaper reporters and publishers, county supervisors, a severely mentally handicapped 33 year-old, a police sergeant, and Latino citizens caught up in the culture of cruelty created and encouraged by Arpaio.

Our cases played out on the outskirts of the pandering political expediency of Arpaio’s clumsy and unconstitutional assault on Latinos. The Arpaio abuses embedded in those assaults, like our civil rights cases, were engineered to stoke fear and feed the frenzy of his fanatics and fill his campaign coffers.

For the most part and for years, it was a banal political and cash success for Arpaio. But Arpaio’s political theater cost Maricopa County taxpayers hundreds of millions. Deals with the dark side are designed to deliver a windfall, but his reelections were a vacuous bargain for our county. We are still paying that tab, and while Arpaio raised millions more, crime and recidivism in our country remained constant.

Paul Penzone’s promise in 2016 was that he would replace Arpaio’s political pandering with an apolitical law enforcement professional. That November, intelligent voters of the right, left and center embraced that Penzone promise.

Then Elvia Diaz reported in her column that “pro-immigrant activists are crying foul” that “Penzone is no different than Arpaio,” mostly because Penzone has not kicked federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from our county jails. Penzone is accused of “making a political calculation” by keeping an ICE desk in his jail.

But consider this: 54% of those transferred to ICE are in jail for felony charges, convictions or warrants. The majority of the balance of transferred inmates are in jail for aggravated DUI and for domestic violence. Some of those inmates will beat felony, aggravated DUI or domestic violence charges but will have to endure federal detention in the meantime.

That inconvenience is a consequence of their immigration irregularities. Statistically, most will be found guilty by plea bargain or verdict. Allowing that group back into our communities unnecessarily puts innocents at risk. Sheriff Penzone’s practice of keeping ICE in our jails ensures our justice system will deal with such inmates, regardless of ethnicity. Our justice system is not perfect, but it is the best in the world.

If apolitical public-policy and professional public-safety decisions by Sheriff Penzone are his version of crude “political calculations,” please applaud Penzone for making our county a safer and more decent place to live to raise a family.

In 1770, John Adams famously cautioned an inflamed jury considering murder charges against his British soldier clients who were accused of killing colonists in the Boston Massacre that “facts are stubborn things.”

Now, inflamed immigration activists who compare Sheriff Penzone to Arpaio are gaslighting our communities in spite of “stubborn facts.” Arpaio’s lamentable legacy is that his political expediencies always predicted his policing practices.

Maricopa County has in Sheriff Penzone a truly apolitical law enforcement professional with no “celebrity”obsession. He and his office will surely make mistakes. That is human. But those mistakes will not be because of any “political calculations” by Sheriff Penzone.