Court-appointed monitor in MCSO profiling case holds first in person meeting in 3 years
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The court-appointed monitor overseeing compliance at the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office with three court orders to root our racial profiling against Latino drivers held a community meeting in person in Arizona for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic.
His visit to Arizona is part of his ongoing quarterly reviews of the Sheriff's Office's activities and followed the announcement from Sheriff Paul Penzone that he would step down in January. Penzone inherited compliance with court-mandated reforms after defeating former Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2016.
Robert Warshaw and his 13-member compliance team held a community meeting in the town of Guadalupe on Thursday night to provide updates on MCSO's compliance efforts in the Melendres v. Arpaio racial profiling lawsuit, which has cost county taxpayers more than $250 million to address.
More than a decade after a federal judge in Phoenix found that sheriff's deputies under Arpaio had racially profiled Latino drivers in Maricopa County, the Sheriff's Office remains out of compliance with court-mandated reforms.
Last November, U.S. District Court Judge G. Murray Snow found Penzone in contempt of court, civilly, not criminally.
Snow issued a third order with additional reforms focused on clearing a backlog of misconduct complaints against deputies, one of two core areas where the Sheriff's Office remains out of compliance. Court records show the backlog stood at 1,765 cases as of Sept. 30. They can take more than two years to complete.
Penzone, who was not in attendance at Thursday's community meeting, blasted Snow's orders during his announcement to step down, saying the court mandates restricted his ability to do his job effectively. He also directed criticism at Warshaw.
"A guy who sits in North Carolina hasn't been here in three years ... but I'm the one responsible for the work that they do and the outcomes they produce. Because if they don't produce a certain outcome, then this county, this community pays more taxpayer dollars," Penzone said in an Oct. 2 press conference. "You want to judge me on the outcomes, but you don't want to give me the chance to call the plays or put the players on the field."
Warshaw, who has overseen the compliance efforts for about nine years, declined to speak to The Arizona Republic on Thursday. But he addressed some of those criticisms when speaking to a crowd of about 70 people inside the Frank Elementary School in Guadalupe.
"I've read in the newspaper that we haven't been here in three years. It's not really true," Warshaw said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult to travel to Arizona for the quarterly reviews.
"But we continued our work. We did it virtually, and we are constantly on the phone and interacting with members of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, as well as the parties," he said. "And we also have a member of our team who lives here right in Maricopa County, who interacts with Maricopa County on a fairly sustained basis."
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During Thursday's meeting, the Sheriff's Office chair of administration, Ann Scheel, provided additional details about compliance efforts on the two outstanding core areas: the complaints backlog and continued disparities in traffic stops.
The latest traffic study published in June showed that Latino drivers in Maricopa County were still more likely to be detained for longer periods of time, and to be cited or searched during those traffic stops.
Scheel said the Sheriff's Office had flagged 135 deputies for potential bias during monthly traffic stop reviews implemented since April 2021. Seventeen of those deputies were referred to an "intervention," a talk held by their supervisors. But none were referred to the department's Professional Standards Bureau, which oversees misconduct allegations.
The court monitor said he doesn't believe that Penzone's agency is happy with the results showing ongoing disparities in traffic stops.
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While praising the progress that the Sheriff's Office has made to comply with the court orders, Warshaw called those disparities in traffic stops a "major issue," and acknowledged it as a source of frustration.
"They're not content with that, and I don't want it to be believed that we think, or anyone else thinks, that they're content with that," Warshaw said.
On the misconduct complaints backlog, Scheel also said Professional Standards investigators prioritize complaints filed by Latino residents in Maricopa County. Since July 2016, they have received 566 complaints by Latinos, of which 105 alleged bias by sheriff's deputies. During that same time period, the bureau completed 351 complaint investigations.
"Of those closed, 10 were sustained for bias, or where bias was found," Scheel said. "And I don't have the statistics of what the punishment or the discipline was for those deputies that were found to be biased. But it can and often is termination."
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The third court order issued in November reiterated calls for the Sheriff's Office to complete misconduct investigations against deputies in less than 85 days. At the time the order was issued, the average length of time it took to complete a single investigation was about 800 days.
"It should not take more than a year or a year and a half for a citizen or a member of the community to hear what the final disposition was of the complaint that they may have lodged against a deputy," Warshaw said Thursday.
The community meeting also featured brief remarks by the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the Melendres lawsuit, as well as by representatives from the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, which intervened in the case.
Less than 30 minutes of the two-hour meeting was set aside for public comments, frustrating some in attendance who were unable to share their remarks with the monitoring team.
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Guadalupe, a small town sandwiched between Phoenix and Tempe and which is majority Latino and Native American, was a main target of Arpaio's immigration raids that led to the Melendres racial profiling lawsuit in 2008. It contracts with the Sheriff's Office for public safety services.
Andrew Sanchez, a Guadalupe resident, told the monitor after his presentation Thursday that the community was still dealing with many of the same issues to this day, citing a lingering breakdown in trust with deputies and rising crime that goes underreported because of it.
He said he attributed part of that breach in trust to the Sheriff's Office still employing or even promoting staff who had been around and even participated in the immigration raids in Guadalupe and other parts of Maricopa County nearly 15 years ago.
"This Band-Aid approach to the Melendres case that is constantly happening is not addressing the issue," Sanchez said. "There is a cancer in the Sheriff's Office that has not been addressed. And it's not a wound, it's a cancer. A wound will heal, the cancer needs to be removed."
Other community members in attendance said that while Penzone's relationship with the community was better than Arpaio's, the outgoing sheriff had continued to enforce a more confrontational approach to policing that fostered resentment among Guadalupe residents.
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Jewel Valenzuela, a former teacher in Guadalupe and a member of the Yaqui tribe, said the town still suffers from collective trauma that has lingered to this day. She said she was glad to learn that Penzone would be stepping down in January.
"I think that it's great, because our community rallied about voting for him and putting him into office, and within two weeks he was back to doing the same things as Arpaio," she said.
Valenzuela also expressed frustration with the ballooning costs of the court-appointed monitor and compliance with the Melendres lawsuit, saying that taxpayer money could have been better invested in schools and youth programs in Guadalupe.
Have any news tips or story ideas about immigration in the Southwest? Reach the reporter at rafael.carranza@arizonarepublic.com, or follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @RafaelCarranza.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Court monitor in MCSO racial profiling case returns to Arizona
