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| Sheriff Joe Arpaio |
His reaction to the Arpaio pardon was dismissive. Who cares about little things like that, he said, when our President might be a Russian agent. And he considered anyone who did focus on the Arpaio pardon to be engaged in mere “virtue signaling,” i.e., moral preening and posturing, rather than serious engagement of the issues. When a Latino (especially from Arizona) tried to explain why Arpaio was really a serious issue, he would simply write it off as more virtue signaling. Alas, the 140 character limit of Twitter does not allow an adequate response (I don't have a Twitter account for that very reason), so I will write about it at length here.
And here I will say that, no, this is not mere moral preening and posturing, not mere
virtue signaling. This isn’t like some
college students fretting about “cultural appropriation” if they eat sushi or
do yoga. It is not like insisting that
Jenner must be referred to as “Caitlyn” and “she” and that medical patients be
allows to mark themselves as “male” when receiving a Pap smear or “female” when
receiving a prostate exam. It is not
like taking down any and all monuments to a person with a less than admirable
event in their past, or policing speech for the latest politically incorrect words,
much less firing an Asian sports announcer for being named “Robert Lee.” Sheriff
Arpaio is deathly serious and proof that real racism and real police brutality
remain serious issues to this day.
This article gives a good overview of his career. It makes the point that before Arpaio (and in most of the US today) the sheriff was not (and is not) all that important a law enforcement official. The sheriff is not all that important an official. Maricopa County,where Arpaio was sheriff, is geographically large (as are all US counties west of the 100th meridian) and populous (Phoenix is in Maricopa). But the sheriff is only in charge of law enforcement outside incorporated cities and in communities too small to afford their own police departments. Most of the policing in Maricopa County (and in most US counties) is done by city police departments. The sheriff's main job was to run the county jail.
Arpaio began his career by boasting that he would prove his toughness on crime by making the Maricopa County Jail as brutal and inhumane at the Eighth Amendment would allow. He housed inmates in tents with temperatures up to 135 degrees in the Arizona summer, next to the dump, the dog pound, and the sewage disposal plant. He served food only twice a day, no hot meals. He taunted hungry inmates by showing cooking shows and weather channels illustrating the heat. He had inmates work cleaning public roads in shackles and old-style chain gang uniforms. Or else he paraded them in pink.
Keep in mind that county jails are not where convicts go to serve hard time. They house people who have not yet been convicted and are entitled to a presumption of innocence, or people serving misdemeanor sentences of less than a year. Felons sentenced to serious time go to state penitentiaries, which must have seemed pleasant by comparison.
And if Arpaio's goal was to be as brutal an inhumane as the Eighth Amendment would allow, he and his men frequently overstepped it as well. They denied medical care to people with chronic health conditions -- and to pregnant women, with unknown numbers of miscarriages and stillbirths as a result. They strapped purported trouble makers to a restraining chair -- including a paraplegic man who suffered neck injuries and much of the use of his arms as well, or cutting off ventilation to overheated cells. His jail had forty times as many lawsuits against it as the jails in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston combined.
Arpaio's obsession with illegal immigration was relatively late and initially opportunistic. He concluded that people who liked brutal treatment of inmates also tended to be up in arms about illegal immigration, so he adopted the issue as his own. But if he was late and opportunistic in coming to the issue, he made up for lost time. He harassed Latinos. He ethnically profiled. He routinely arrested every Latino at a crime scene on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. The muscled in on a hostile police chief's territory, wearing full riot gear to raid the city hall and public library and arrest three cleaning women as illegal immigrants. Mostly Latino communities, even ones consisting almost entirely of citizens going back for generations, endured raids of deputies with helicopters, horses and paddy wagons, demanding proof of citizenship and, when no illegals could be found, issuing tickets for whatever else they could think of. And in the end he became so obsessed with fighting illegal immigration that he lost interest in fighting crime altogether. He stopped investigating any crime against illegal immigrants and let other investigations languish.
It should hardly come as a surprise that such a man also abused his office to harass political opponents. When a local newspaper exposed these abuses, he issued fake grand jury subpoenas demanding all their sources and the e-mail addresses of all their subscribers. When the editors published the demand, he had them arrested for breaking grand jury secrecy. (Charges were dropped and the editors sued). He even staged a fake assassination attempt. Oh, yes, and his deputies forced a puppy into a burning house during a botched SWAT raid and laughed while it burned alive.*
But the biggest scandal of all is not any of this. It is what a horrified British commenter on Twitter remarked – but aren’t sheriffs in the US elective? Then why didn’t the people of Maricopa County vote him out of office? And the shameful answer – the people of Maricopa County liked what he was doing (except for the puppy, presumably). Another suggested that if the full scale of what Arpaio was doing had been more widely known, he would never have been a conservative icon. But the people of Arizona knew perfectly well what he was up to, and they applauded (at least a majority did). For some time he was the most popular politician in Arizona and considered a run for Governor or Senate. Only when he began utterly neglecting crime did he lose popularity. And even then he lost by a less than ten point margin, when margins as lopsided as 72-27% are not unusual in local elections.
Arpaio began his career by boasting that he would prove his toughness on crime by making the Maricopa County Jail as brutal and inhumane at the Eighth Amendment would allow. He housed inmates in tents with temperatures up to 135 degrees in the Arizona summer, next to the dump, the dog pound, and the sewage disposal plant. He served food only twice a day, no hot meals. He taunted hungry inmates by showing cooking shows and weather channels illustrating the heat. He had inmates work cleaning public roads in shackles and old-style chain gang uniforms. Or else he paraded them in pink.
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| Illustration of county sizes across the US |
And if Arpaio's goal was to be as brutal an inhumane as the Eighth Amendment would allow, he and his men frequently overstepped it as well. They denied medical care to people with chronic health conditions -- and to pregnant women, with unknown numbers of miscarriages and stillbirths as a result. They strapped purported trouble makers to a restraining chair -- including a paraplegic man who suffered neck injuries and much of the use of his arms as well, or cutting off ventilation to overheated cells. His jail had forty times as many lawsuits against it as the jails in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston combined.
Arpaio's obsession with illegal immigration was relatively late and initially opportunistic. He concluded that people who liked brutal treatment of inmates also tended to be up in arms about illegal immigration, so he adopted the issue as his own. But if he was late and opportunistic in coming to the issue, he made up for lost time. He harassed Latinos. He ethnically profiled. He routinely arrested every Latino at a crime scene on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. The muscled in on a hostile police chief's territory, wearing full riot gear to raid the city hall and public library and arrest three cleaning women as illegal immigrants. Mostly Latino communities, even ones consisting almost entirely of citizens going back for generations, endured raids of deputies with helicopters, horses and paddy wagons, demanding proof of citizenship and, when no illegals could be found, issuing tickets for whatever else they could think of. And in the end he became so obsessed with fighting illegal immigration that he lost interest in fighting crime altogether. He stopped investigating any crime against illegal immigrants and let other investigations languish.
It should hardly come as a surprise that such a man also abused his office to harass political opponents. When a local newspaper exposed these abuses, he issued fake grand jury subpoenas demanding all their sources and the e-mail addresses of all their subscribers. When the editors published the demand, he had them arrested for breaking grand jury secrecy. (Charges were dropped and the editors sued). He even staged a fake assassination attempt. Oh, yes, and his deputies forced a puppy into a burning house during a botched SWAT raid and laughed while it burned alive.*
But the biggest scandal of all is not any of this. It is what a horrified British commenter on Twitter remarked – but aren’t sheriffs in the US elective? Then why didn’t the people of Maricopa County vote him out of office? And the shameful answer – the people of Maricopa County liked what he was doing (except for the puppy, presumably). Another suggested that if the full scale of what Arpaio was doing had been more widely known, he would never have been a conservative icon. But the people of Arizona knew perfectly well what he was up to, and they applauded (at least a majority did). For some time he was the most popular politician in Arizona and considered a run for Governor or Senate. Only when he began utterly neglecting crime did he lose popularity. And even then he lost by a less than ten point margin, when margins as lopsided as 72-27% are not unusual in local elections.
It was not
any of these things that Trump pardoned.
Arpaio has not been convicted of any of them. What Arpaio was convicted of and Trump
pardoned was criminal contempt of court for disobeying a court order to stop
his ethnic profiling. And I will agree,
if our side focuses on this, on Trump not following Department of Justice
guidelines or undermining the authority of the courts, we really do give the
impression of mere virtue signaling. And
treating this as a mere procedural dispute allows argument on the procedural
merits of Trump’s actions, all of which is altogether beside the point. The real issue, and the one we should be
focusing on is all the crimes he was not
convicted of, the crimes recited above.
And if this creates a misleading impression that Trump pardoned him for
the crimes cited above, so be it. Let
the other side do the explaining for a change.
It is, after all, his other crimes that make Arpaio unworthy of pardon. Also emphasize the puppy. Plenty of people who ultimately believe
Arpaio’s human victims deserved what they got would be outraged by the torture
and killing of an innocent animal. (Just
as I have commented that Trump’s base would forgive him for shooting someone in
the middle of Fifth Avenue, but not for strangling kittens).
This is not
mere moral posturing or virtue signaling.
This is our second-worst case scenario of what we fear most from Trump. (The
worst, of course, would be nuclear war).
One final
comment. Up till now, I have downplayed
Trump and race. Yes, the issue has been
there. And yes, Trump’s embrace of
“birther” conspiracy theories was clearly a play to racial anxiety. But in the end my complaints about Trump have
focused more on his corruption, his incompetence, his utter ignorance of
policy, his short attention span, his personal grudges, his impulsiveness, his
narcissism, and his utter unfitness to lead in a crisis. But after Trump showed such reluctance to
condemn neo-Nazis and pardoned Joe Arpaio, it is time to stop ignoring the
obvious. Trump is a racist and he is
pandering to racism. And it is not
playing at “identity politics” to point out the obvious.
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*See this link for a series of exposes on Arpaio. I also highly recommend the New Yorker article. One of the most striking things about it is just how much Arpaio resembles Trump. Like Trump he is a publicity hound, believing there is no such thing as bad publicity. He has the same narcissism, the same cruelty, the same intolerance of criticism, the same exaggerated sense of disgust, the same malice tempered by incompetence -- except that incompetence in an overreaching sheriff is deadly. He even appears to share Trump's germ phobia. And, of course, he also had his own birther investigation.
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*See this link for a series of exposes on Arpaio. I also highly recommend the New Yorker article. One of the most striking things about it is just how much Arpaio resembles Trump. Like Trump he is a publicity hound, believing there is no such thing as bad publicity. He has the same narcissism, the same cruelty, the same intolerance of criticism, the same exaggerated sense of disgust, the same malice tempered by incompetence -- except that incompetence in an overreaching sheriff is deadly. He even appears to share Trump's germ phobia. And, of course, he also had his own birther investigation.
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