Sheriff Arpaio supporters sent me e-mail after e-mail accusing the Tribune of liberal media bias in its reporting last summer the sheriff’s office and the costs and effectiveness of its illegal immigrant round-ups.
Now comes the Goldwater Institute which today issued a sweeping indictment of Arpaio’s policies pretty much along the same lines as the Tribune’s report.
Has the Goldwater Institute gone liberal? I don’t think so. The author of the study is Clint Bolick, whose credentials as a Goldwater conservative are indisputable. What it does bring into question is the credibility of critics who throw the “liberal media” bomb every time they see a report that is contrary to their beliefs.
Here are just a few sentences from the report’s executive summary:
“The Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Offi ce is responsible for vitally important law-enforcement functions in one of the largest counties in the nation. It defi nes its core missions as law-enforcement services, support services, and detention.
MCSO falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission in all three areas. Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions. It has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally, and to extensive trips by MCSO officials to Honduras for purposes that are nebulous at best. Profligate spending on those diversions helped produce a financial crisis in late 2007 that forced MCSO to
curtail or reduce important law-enforcement functions.
In terms of support services, MCSO has allowed a huge backlog of outstanding warrants to accumulate, and has seriously disadvantaged local police departments by closing satellite booking facilities. MCSO’s detention facilities are subject to costly lawsuits for excessive use of force and inadequate medical services. Compounding the substantive problems are chronically poor record-keeping and reporting of statistics, coupled with resistance to public disclosure.”
