Sheriff David Clarke: The Warlord of Milwaukee County

Now that Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona’s Maricopa County faces a possible federal felony conviction that would dislodge him from office, the floor is open for nominations to replace him as the preening figurehead for the Punitive Populist constituency. Milwaukee County, Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke, who has been auditioning for that role over the past several years, is the prohibitive favorite for that position. 

Like Arpaio, Clarke is a part-time sheriff and full-time media whore, tirelessly seeking opportunities to favor Fox News viewers with a visage set in a sullen pout that he mistakes for an expression of Churchillian pugnacity. Where Arpaio advertised himself as the “World’s Toughest Sheriff,” Clarke has become the most visible exponent of the view that law enforcement officers should be provided with an institutional “safe space” befitting members of a specially protected class.

Perhaps the most remarkable facet of Clarke’s public persona is his studied rejection of the idea that sheriffs and other police officials should be peace officers. He espouses the view that law enforcement is a tribe that is at war not only with criminal offenders, but with its law-abiding critics. 

Clarke, an FBI-indoctrinated prohibitionist fanatic who was awarded a Master’s Degree in “Security Studies” through the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security in Monterey, California, has issued an explicit demand for the suppression – and, if necessary, the “eradication” --  of Black Lives Matter activists and others giving voice to what he calls “anti-cop rhetoric.” Such people, he maintains, are “vulgar, vile, [and] vicious … slime” who should be characterized as “domestic terrorists.”

Following a prominent speaking role at the investiture of God-Emperor (in waiting) Donald Trump, Clarke published an essay urging the public and the political class to mobilize for a literal war of extermination – and insisting that citizens must rally to the defense and protection of the police officers whose advertised role is to protect them.

“It’s time to come to the aid of our police, our front-line soldiers, by calling this war, and not terrorism,” exhorted Clarke in an essay for The Hill. “Avoiding the truth through wordsmithing – the false narrative of the lone-wolf – is contemptible as more innocent officers perish while our politicians hem and haw. We as a people need to declare that we stand with the rule of law, and not with the false tales of the revolutionary Marxist forces, who most recently have rebranded themselves from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter.”

A poseur on horseback.

Those who refuse to enlist in that war are “accomplices” in league with “an enemy within our borders [and] without our borders,” Clarke insists.

“This slime needs to be eradicated from American society and American culture,” Clark insisted during an August 29, 2015 interview with Fox News host Jeanne Piro. While professing to “love the First Amendment” and “freedom of speech,” Clarke maintained that the right is “not absolute.” You can’t say anything you want in the United States. You cannot threaten people’s lives…. This is not First Amendment-protected.”

As he explained in the same interview, Clarke believes that the spectrum of impermissible speech may end with overt death threats, but it begins with the “disparagement” of police in social media.

It should be noted that as a Law-and-Order Leninist, Clarke does not object to insurrectionist speech or activism in principle: It’s all a question of who does what to whom. As Donald Trump’s presidential prospects have dimmed, Clarke’s ardor for order has waned, and his appetite for retaliatory violence has waxed. 

“It’s incredible that our institutions of gov[ernment], W[hite] H[ouse], Congress, DOJ, and big media are corrupt & all we do is bitch,” wrote Clark in an October 15 post on Twitter. “Pitchforks and torches time.” 

After successfully baiting media critics into condemning his hypocrisy, Clarke published an essay commending himself for emulating the courage of the Founding Fathers. Those men, Clarke apparently forgets, were disreputable radicals who opened fire on law enforcement officers in the performance of their duties on the morning of April 19, 1775, and whose revolutionary exemplars included a black felon named Crispus Attucks (he “stole” himself by escaping the custody of a man with a “lawful” claim to own him) who was killed while assaulting a law enforcement officer and trying to seize his firearm. 

Patriot martyr Crispus Attucks acted in self-defense, but his actions were an obvious threat to “officer safety.” If cornered and compelled to contemplate the matter at adequate length, Clarke might well dissolve into a puddle of cognitive dissonance. 

Yes, the sheriff professes to revere the colonial-era patriots, but he also subscribes to the “officer safety uber alles” dogma, under which the use of hostile language toward officers by a Mundane can justify the use of lethal force by the former. This was made clear in Clarke’s interview with Megyn Kelly in which he discussed the arrest and subsequent death in detention of Chicago activist Sandra Bland.

Bland was stopped in Hempstead, Texas by State Trooper Brian Encinia on July 10, 2015 for allegedly failing to signal a turn. The already tense encounter deteriorated when Encinia ordered Bland to extinguish her cigarette. She was not legally forbidden to have a lit cigarette in her car, but police officers are often trained to perceive lit cigarettes, car fresheners, or even heavy colognes and perfumes as masking agents to cover up the smell of marijuana.

When Bland refused to put out the cigarette, Encina (who had previously been warned about “unprofessional” behavior) needlessly escalated the encounter, ordering her from the car, bellowing the incantation “I am giving you a lawful order,” then pulling a Taser and threatening to “light you up.” 

Bland’s violent arrest led to a three-day incarceration in the Waller County Jail that ended with a death that has been described as a suicide, despite a number of documented irregularities and derelictions on the part of the guards.

Asked by Kelly if he considered Trooper Encinia’s actions to be appropriate, Clarke said that he “wholeheartedly” supported the officer. This encounter, he continued, was a “classic case of a citizen who did not comply with an officer’s lawful commands.”

Although she was armed only with a lit cigarette – an object some exceptionally inventive police apologists describe as a dangerous weapon – and her own sense of self-ownership, Clarke described Bland as “loaded for bear from the time she was pulled over.”

“I expect an officer to go into arrest mode” in dealing with a citizen exhibiting such impudent self-possession in the presence of a uniformed overseer, Clarke told Kelly. “And once you go into arrest mode, you get to move up on the force continuum – it’s no longer verbal commands, you can use intermediate weapons. He chose a Taser.”

While the violence employed by Trooper Encinia was entirely appropriate, Clarke opined, “I was more appalled with the language [Bland] was using with an authority figure…. She did some things that caused an officer to move up in terms of his response to keep her safe and to keep himself safe.” (Emphasis added.)

Disdainful language hurled at “an authority figure” is to be treated as a “threat,” from Sheriff Clarke’s perspective – and a violent assault with a reliably lethal weapon by an officer on an unarmed woman suspected of a trivial traffic violation is merely a responsible exercise of that “authority.”

Trooper Encina was subsequently fired and charged with perjury for lying in the official report describing his assault on Bland. This would not change Clarke’s opinion of the ex-trooper and his conduct, given that the sheriff consistently condemns – on the basis of purely tribal considerations -- legal action against abusive law enforcement officers.

“I’m tired of qualifying these statements [by talking] about `bad apples’ within the law enforcement profession,” complained Clark in another Fox News appearance after a Texas prosecutor offered a fleeting acknowledgement that corrupt police officers exist. Clarke perceives law enforcement as an undifferentiated mass of heroic virtue – or at least he insists that the public should embrace that official fiction. 

It has been said that no honest cop ever struck it rich, and no wealthy cop could possibly be honest. (For the purposes of discussion, I will stipulate to the possibility that the words "honest" and "cop" can be used in proximity without violently annihilating themselves as if they were matter and anti-matter.) Clarke is a stranger to the penury that frequently is virtue’s unwelcome companion.

 

During 2015, Clarke was paid a more than adequate plunder-derived salary of $132,290. He also received speaking fees, travel reimbursements, gifts, and other benefits amounting to more than $150,000, reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. This includes trips overseas to Israel and Russia sponsored by the National Rifle Association.

The Sheriff was given more than $9,000 in travel reimbursements to attend the annual Herb Allen & Company conference, a four-day gathering of moguls and media figures in Sun Valley, Idaho. In November, he was paid a $5,000 honorarium to offer a 48-minute presentation at the annual Restoration Weekend, a neocon assembly in Charleston, South Carolina. During that visit he was given nearly $3,000 in travel reimbursements, $1,212 for lodging, and almost $800 for meals. 

Clarke told the Journal-Sentinel that “I reported everything that I was required to report.” Milwaukee attorney Jeremy Levinson, who focuses on campaign finance and ethics issues, argues that “It looks like Clarke’s banking money he shouldn’t or is a part-time sheriff with a side job.” 

However, continued Levinson, the latter possibility “would require one to believe he’d get those lucrative speaking gigs and travel even if he weren’t an elected official.” 

Sheriff Clarke has been warmly embraced by a segment of the population that looks upon all government agencies and officials – except for the police and the military – with incurable suspicion and no small amount of hostility. This includes some people who really should know better:  Clarke was named 2013 “Sheriff of the Year” by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a group that opposes federalization of law enforcement.

That honor is a dubious fit for someone who clearly sees himself as a warlord, rather than a peace officer.


                                        Introducing The Libertarian Institute

Some people I greatly respect and admire -- Scott Horton, Sheldon Richman, and Jared Labell -- have invited me to participate in the newly created Libertarian Institute as managing editor. They have done me a tremendous honor, and I am deeply grateful. Scott's radio program is a national treasure, Sheldon is a man of deep and expansive learning and wisdom, and Jared has been aptly described as a "force of nature in the freedom movement."

My essays and podcasts will be available at The Libertarian Institute's website, and will continue to appear here, as well. That site will also host a blog featuring the insights offered by dozens of the most perspicuous and principled people in the individualist movement.

Once again, I am honored to be part of this undertaking, and thankful to those who have found my work worthwhile. God bless you all.

This week's Freedom Zealot Podcast:

Dum spiro, pugno!

Addicted to the Warfare State

La Reconquista? BLM travel advisory in AZ.

(See corrections and clarifications below, 7/12)


 (Updated below, 7/10)

Which is the more serious threat to life, liberty and property: The illicit violence practiced by a handful of furtive armed drug smugglers in the Arizona desert, or the increasingly brazen militarization of U.S. law enforcement in the "war on drugs"?  

According to some hyperventilating commentators, drug smugglers -- with the guilty acquiescence of Barack Obama -- have seized control of a huge swath of Arizona, thereby asserting alien sovereignty over what was once American soil. If this were true, points out libertarian journalist (and Arizona resident) J.D. Tuccille, the Narcotics lords would preside over a kingdom "populated by rattlesnakes and cholla."

What has actually happened is a minor but politically exploitable increase in criminal activity in one of the many drug smuggling corridors that have long existed in the southwest, channels of illicit commerce created in order to serve a huge market that persists despite decades of prohibition.

While Mexican bandits supposedly exercise dominion over reptiles and cacti, National Guard units throughout the country are actively involved in transforming nominally civilian law enforcement agencies into a full-blown domestic army of occupation. Last year, according to Albany, New York Fox affiliate WXXA, the New York State National Guard "assisted in more than 2,000 arrests ... and had almost $150 million in drug, property and weapon seizures."

While they do engage in the occasional isolated shoot-out, the drug gangs supposedly controlling a section of Arizona aren't terrorizing innocent families in late-night or early-morning armed raids. Nor are they detaining -- and sometimes killing -- motorists at checkpoints. They're not plundering people in roadside shakedowns.  Criminal violence of that kind is carried out every day by police -- often with hands-on military assistance -- as part of the "war on drugs."

According to Col. Alden Saddlemire of the New York National Guard, the martial language used to describe this domestic campaign is literal, not metaphorical. "The war on drugs is an ongoing war," Saddlemire told WXXA. "It's a domestic fight [we] firmly believe in."

Occupying Army: No, these guys aren't Mexican narco-terrorists.

Prohibition always results in the criminalization of markets. Thus it's hardly surprising that America's vast market for prohibited mood-altering substances is being served by violent and ruthless people.

That violence, however, is mostly self-contained. The same cannot be said for the violence -- both implicit and overt -- carried out in the name of drug enforcement, which in practical terms is little more than a price support program for the narcotics cartels. 

According to official propaganda, the National Guard Counterdrug Program (NGCDP)  "operates in all 54 states and territories to support local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies..... [The program] currently operates 125 OH-58 Kiowa helicopters to support federal, state and local Law Enforcement Agencies' demand for aviation support in Counterdrug operations."

Guard pilots and support personnel are actively involved in "area surveillance and reconnaissance; vehicle/fugitive surveillance and tracking, cover/force protection during RAID/Sweeps" and cannabis eradication operations.  

One must hack through a dense thicket of acronyms in order to uncover what's really happening here. The  NGCDP -- that's National Guard Counterdrug Program -- "recently realigned CD RAID Detachments into Security and Support Battalions," the mystified reader is told without being informed that "CD RAID" refers to Counter-Drug Recon and Aerial Interdiction Detachments.

We're not in Mayberry anymore.

We then learn that although "mission focus" remains on "LEA support to CD operations" -- that is, assisting Law Enforcement Agencies carry out Counter-Drug programs -- "HLS/HLD missions will take on a larger role than before." That singularly opaque clause refers to Homeland Security/Homeland Defense operations. 

Deprived of semantic camouflage this is an admission that the escalation of the military's role in the "war on drugs" will segue into larger, and increasingly overt, domestic military role in "homeland security." 

The NGCDP is eager to dispense all kinds of military hardware -- complete with "technical support" personnel -- on any "civilian" law enforcement agency that puts in a request.

You want night vision goggles? Forward-Looking Infrared gear (which was used to such dramatic effect in the murderous final assault on the Branch Davidians)? Thermal imagers, surveillance aircraft, mobile gamma-ray automobile inspection units? Just give the National Guard a holler, and they'll be happy to help.

Wish list: A National Guard menu for police militarization.

Sure, this means some swivel-hipping around that pesky Posse Comitatus Act, but it's pretty much a dead letter anyway.

Once the Guard is seamlessly integrated into the domestic counter-drug effort, they'll be ready to carry out whatever other homeland security missions that arise:  mass arrests of protesters and perfectly harmless civilians during political conventions, confiscation of firearms during disasters or other emergencies, or even -- as Gen. George S. Patton once recommended -- the use of total war tactics (summary mass detentions, summary executions of conspicuous troublemakers, the use of toxic gas and white phosphorous munitions) against organized dissident groups.

All of this has been done already, on a limited scale and in specific circumstances. Because of the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror," the infrastructure is now in place to institutionalize those once-exceptional abuses, if -- make that "when" -- our self-appointed rulers choose to do so.

Some who are properly alarmed over all of this have invested their hopes in Sheriff Richard Mack's campaign to educate and mobilize county sheriffs to resist federal usurpation of state and local authority. Sheriff Mack is an admirable man, and his campaign is worthwhile -- but too many sheriffs have already been bought off by the Feds.

One example among many is Sheriff Tom Bosenko of California's  Shasta County, who allocated $340,000 to create a special marijuana suppression unitlargesse.

Paul Babeu, the Sheriff of Arizona's Pinal County, has pioneered a new approach to federalizing local law enforcement: He has actually invited the Feds to occupy Arizona on the pretext of defending the state from the illegal immigrant "invasion."

Sheriff Babeu -- a PR-fixated political ally of arch-neocon John McCain -- is consciously carving out a media-friendly persona as the heir to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It was Babeu who induced a paroxysm of populist outrage by declaring that the Obama administration had effectively surrendered a swath of Arizona to Mexico.

“It’s literally out of control,” Babeu insisted in an interview with Fox News. “We stood with Senator McCain and literally demanded support for 3,000 soldiers to be deployed to Arizona to get this under control and finally secure our border with Mexico."

Pinal County -- Sheriff Babeu's jurisdiction -- is well inside the border with Mexico.  Pima County, which actually shares a border with Mexico, is the responsibility of

Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who also takes a hard line on immigration enforcement but doesn't share Babeu's siege mentality or appetite for media attention.

Sheriff Dupnik is one of several Arizona law enforcement veterans who believe that the problems associated with illegal immigration are being inflated into a politically useful "crisis."

Retired Mesa police officer Bill Richardson, who worked in counter-narcotics task forces in several Arizona counties, believes that Babeu -- like Arpaio and Arizona state senator Russell Pearce (chief sponsor of SB 1070) -- is "fanning the flames of fear, that the undocumented are the root cause of crime in Arizona. In fact, they are not."

Whether or not this assessment is accurate, both immigration (legal and illegal) and violent crime have been steadily decreasing in Arizona over the past decade -- a period encompassing Babeu's entire law enforcement career.

Richardson, a long-time Arizona resident with decades of law enforcement experience, points out that Babeu -- who relocated to Arizona after losing a mayoral race in North Adams, Massachusetts in 2001 -- was a police officer in Chandler for just 5 1/2 years (during which time he served as head of the local police union) before being elected Pima County Sheriff.

Two of those years were spent in National Guard deployments -- one of them in Iraq, the other on the southern border as part of a joint effort with the Border Patrol called "Operation Jump Start."

Babeu, who enlisted at 21 and currently holds the rank of Major in the National Guard, often campaigned in uniform as a perennial Republican political candidate in Massachusetts. He was successful once, winning a spot on the Berkshire County Commission and a leadership role in the County GOP.

After three unsuccessful bids for higher office, Babeu followed his parents (long-time Republican activists themselves) to Arizona, which had a more congenial political climate. (Joe Arpaio, interestingly, is likewise a transplanted Massachusetts native.)

Babeu, who refers to McCain as his "hero,"  is hard-wired into the neo-con-dominated Republican media apparatus, and he clearly has aspirations above and beyond his current position.

Just as importantly, 41-year-old Babeu -- who is both a county sheriff and a National Guard major -- literally embodies the ongoing merger of the military and law enforcement. He is the fons et origo of the notion that Obama, in an act of high treason, surrendered sacred American soil to Mexican drug gangs -- which isn't strictly true, of course, but is irresistibly potent to political opportunists.

Immigration, Babeu insists, "is the number one issue that faces Arizona." This could be considered the truth in the sense that it is the most useful issue for candidates looking to build a political career, and opportunistic incumbents -- including Senator McCain, who once supported amnesty for illegal immigrants but has re-cast himself as a flint-eyed border guardian in his ongoing re-election campaign.

As the current issue of Harper's magazine documents, the most serious problems besetting Arizona have little if anything to do with immigration, and everything to do with the most recent Federal Reserve-engineered depression.

J.D. Tuccille points out that concern over immigration is most pronounced in Phoenix, rather than in the southern part of the state. Phoenix somehow survived the immigrant onslaught, but it may be doomed as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble.

Ken Silverstein of Harper's points out that 61.5 percent of all Phoenix mortgages are "underwater," and unemployment is probably running at about 18 percent or higher. The latter figure can't be explained as a case of immigrants "stealing" jobs from natives, since the housing implosion led to a dramatic contraction of the immigrant labor pool.

Forty-five minutes southwest of Phoenix there's a town called Maricopa that didn't exist ten years ago: It was created at the height of the Fed-induced housing frenzy. It's entirely possible that Maricopa won't exist a decade from now: It was a town built entirely on fraud.

"They weren't building homes," explains the consistently quotable Jay Butler, an associate professor of real estate at Arizona State University. "They were building mortgages that they could put into mortgage-backed securities in order to sell them to investors in China and France." Amid a pervasive atmosphere of moral hazard, mortgage loans were extended to practically anybody with a pulse and the ability sign the necessary documents. The results were utterly predictable.
 
Four years ago in Maricopa, speculators were buying whole tracts of houses and builders were demanding a 12-hour turnaround on building permits in order to meet existing demand. Today, that future ghost town registers a "distress index" (percentage of home sales involving bank-owned or pre-foreclosure properties) of 76.8 percent. 

"In a neighborhood called Maricopa Meadows," writes Ken Silverstein, "we rolled past a block of McMansions, all but a handful of which had gone into foreclosure." Silverstein's guide observed: "You've got people doubling up in houses so they can split utilities.... The story is the same from here to Queen Creek to Buckeye, in all these places that people scattered before the crash."

As the New York Times recently reported, the real estate industry in Arizona is now essentially a subsidiary of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which are in de facto default, sitting on more than $4 trillion worth of bad debts.)  

When the Fed's bubble was expanding, Realtors sold homes to unqualified buyers at grotesquely inflated price. Now that the bubble has burst, Realtors in are doing a similarly brisk business in repossessions. Given the dim prospects for an economic rebound, it's profoundly doubtful that many of those homes will ever be re-sold. And the coming commercial real estate crash will be at least as devastating for Arizona, a "branch office" state with little local industry apart from agriculture. 

As her state descends into economic ruin, Governor Jan Brewer -- hailed by Republican conservatives nation-wide as a heroine for signing SB 1070 -- is working diligently to impose a drastic sales tax increase on the state. Borrowing a familiar leftist trope, Brewer has claimed that people will "die" unless the regressive tax increase is enacted in the midst of a deepening economic contraction. 

As Governor, Brewer (who, like Babeu, is allied with McCain) has done nothing to reduce the size and expense of the state government. The timely and welcome distraction provided by the controversy over SB 1070, notes Barbara Hollingsworth of the Washington Examiner, saved Brewer "from a nasty primary challenge" arising from her $3 billion sales tax increase. 

Now, however, some opinion polls place her just five points behind President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 match-up -- solely on the strength of her perceived role as a proponent of "secure borders." 

Brewer's reputation was enhanced by an open letter to Obama in which Brewer demanded a "border surge" involving at least 6,000 troops. And it wasn't noticeably injured when she made the risible claim that the "majority" of illegal immigrants are working as "mules" in the employ of drug cartels -- a claim immediately and decisively shot down by T.J. Bonner of the National Border Patrol Council. 


Displaying gallantry through heroic understatement, Bonner said that Brewer's demented claim "doesn't comport with reality." This isn't surprising, given that Brewer and her allies aren't in the reality business. Like narcotics pushers, they're in the business of promoting altered states of consciousness for profit -- such as the perception that Arizona is about to be devoured in a Mexican anschluss. 

Brewer persisted in her reality-aversive treatment of the immigration issue by repeatedly making the horrifying and entirely unsubstantiated claim that illegal immigrants had committed "beheadings" in Arizona.

"We cannot afford all this illegal immigration and everything that comes with it, everything from the crime and to the drugs and the kidnappings and the extortion and the beheadings," stated Brewer in an interview with Fox News. While it's true that some drug-related murders in Mexico have involved beheading, there's not been a single documented case of that kind in Arizona. This didn't deter Brewer from reiterating that claim -- citing unspecified "law enforcement agencies" as sources -- in a subsequent interview.

Following up on those interviews, the Arizona Guardian reported that six county medical examiners, including four from border counties, "say they have never heard of such attacks." Which is to say that this is another terrifying claim that doesn't "comport with reality."It is, however, extremely useful for Brewer's brand of what Mencken described as "practical politics" -- "keep[ing] the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

If Brewer and her allies were interested in reality-based solutions to narcotics-related violent crime, Brewer and her ilk would agitate for the repeal of drug prohibition and an end to the subsidies and military aid to Mexico that are fueling the narcotics wars in that country. Instead, they're doing their considerable best to keep their constituents hopelessly addicted to the domestic warfare state. 

(Note: This essay is an expanded version of the original.)  


                                                        Comments, Corrections, and Clarifications, 7/12

"As a resident of Arizona for more than forty years, I assure you that Maricopa did exist more than ten years ago, as did many other small `intersection communities' on the outskirts of the Phoenix Metro area that became developers and mortgage brokers havens," writes an accomplished and well-informed reader from Arizona. "`No industries other than agriculture'? I guess that you are not keeping up with the role of copper in the world marketplace. Arizona is the largest source of copper in the western world. Not to mention the thriving aerospace and electronics, banking and IT industries in the state.... Arizona is [also] in the lead exporting not only copper, but also cotton, alfalfa, beef, and computer chips."


"Errors on such basic facts are not acceptable for someone in your position," he concludes. "It does not change the basic correctness of your thesis, but certainly causes one to pause and consider how deeply familiar you actually are with Arizona as it really is...."

I appreciate the corrections, especially with regard to Arizona's copper industry, which was a significant oversight on my part. My intent in describing Arizona as a "branch office" state was not to deny or minimize the current role of IT and other tech-related employers, but rather to underscore the vulnerability of the state to a commercial real estate collapse in the likely event that out-of-state firms are forced to cut back as a result of the ongoing worldwide contraction. And, for what it's worth, I don't regard "banking" as a viable industry, for reasons made vivid in the rapid expansion, and even more rapid catastrophic collapse, of Maricopa. 


Responding to my observation that "the drug gangs supposedly controlling a section of Arizona aren't terrorizing innocent families in late-night or early-morning armed raids.... [n]or are they detaining -- and sometimes killing -- motorists at checkpoints.... [or] plundering people in roadside shakedowns," another reader (who didn't specify his place of residence) contends: "Well, yes, as a matter of fact they are. This fact in no way lessens the hideous increase in the growth of the police state, but you shouldn't misrepresent the border crime problem."

 

I've consistently acknowledged the serious problem of violent crime at the U.S.-Mexico border, which I believe is largely driven by the politics of domestic prohibition and Washington's insane subsidy of Mexico's narco-state. Ending those policies, in my view, would help mitigate the problem of violence at the border. It probably wouldn't solve it outright, but problems rooted in human depravity aren't amenable to political solutions. 

                                       UPDATE: A Daring Drive through "Re-conquered" Arizona



Boldly risking certain death by decapitation at the hands of ubiquitous Mexican drug smugglers, "Real News Tucson" drives through the section of southern Arizona supposedly ceded to Mexico. Oddly enough, the only trouble they encounter comes at a Border Patrol checkpoint two dozen miles inside the border, where they are definitively told by a BP agent that the notion part of Arizona has been surrendered to Mexican control -- and are therefore inaccessible to Americans -- is "false information."

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Dum spiro, pugno!

The Thin Blue Whine, Pt. II: The Crybaby Thugs of Maricopa County (Second Update, December 18)

Uniformed thug as "political prisoner": Maricopa County Deputy Sheriff Adam Stoddard strikes a martyr's pose for the camera after a few days in "jail." Stoddard was found in contempt after stealing a document from the table of a defense attorney during a court hearing.


To his comrades in the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office (MCSO), Adam Stoddard is a martyr to principle and an innocent victim of injustice -- a heroic figure unjustly consigned to prison by petty, power-hungry figures. His boss, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, went so far as to describe Stoddard as a "political prisoner" during his brief and uncommonly comfortable incarceration.


All of this, predictably enough, is nothing but several acres of stockyard carpeting.


Stoddard, a member of the MCSO's correctional unit, was videotaped stealing a document from the desk of a defense attorney. As a result he spent several days in the custody of his co-workers after being cited for contempt of court by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe for refusing to apologize for his offense.


It's important to recognize that Stoddard -- unlike many others who have been cited for contempt -- actually committed an offense against an individual's rights.

***


***
Stoddard claimed to have seen something on the handwritten documents that constituted a threat to “court security" -- some cryptic conjunction of the words "going to" "steal" and "money," which apparently weren't part of the same sentence.


In addition to his unusual ability to divine the concealed intentions of criminal defendants from words randomly scattered across a page of notes hand-written by somebody else, Deputy Stoddard apparently possesses some form of X-ray vision, since the document he stole was concealed by several on top of it.


Obviously, Stoddard is no ordinary deputy; he must be the Last Son of Krypton, concealing his true identity in the guise of a mild-mannered bailiff.


Superior Court Judge Gary Donahoe wasn’t buying Stoddard's explanations, and was offended Stoddard was trying to sell it.


In his ruling he correctly observed that Stoddard's actions were "unreasonable and unlawful" and resulted in a breach of attorney-client privilege, and that Stoddard's facially ridiculous explanation -- which implicitly accused defense counsel Joanne Cuccia of collaboration in a crime -- injured the attorney's professional reputation.


Had a mere mundane committed an offense similar to Stoddard's, the penalty would have involved some combination of a fine and mandatory jail time. However, Judge Donahoe -- perhaps mindful of the need to maintain cordial relations with the brown-shirted paladins of public order who carry out his decrees -- didn’t send Stoddard immediately to jail, or slap him with a fine. Instead, he ordered Stoddard to apologize, in public, to defense attorney Cuccia.



While there were problems with this proposed compromise, it would have spared Stoddard from spending time behind bars by treating his offense as a mistake, rather than a crime. One could round down to "never" the frequency that common people are offered such consideration by the courts.


But Stoddard's actions weren't a mistake. They were the predictable product of the institutional culture of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. Under the reign of the oleaginous proto-fascist Joe Arpaio, the MCSO has mutated into a lawless armed clique suitable to a third world dictatorship. Indeed, Arpaio and his minions -- including a contingent called the "Special Enforcement Unit" -- have conducted late-night or early-morning raids to intimidate and imprison people who have criticized the Dear Leader.


The controversy involving Adam Stoddard came amid an escalating conflict between Arpaio and his critics in Maricopa County.

*** ***

With the support of his Dear Leader -- who insisted that his deputies only follow his orders, not those of a mere judge --Stoddard defied the court order, telling a press conferece that he wouldn’t apologize “for doing my job,” and that saying he is sorry would be a “lie.”

“Judge Donahoe has ordered me to feel something I do not and say something I cannot,” simpered Deputy Stoddard in his pre-incarceration press conference. But the same can truthfully be said by countless innocent people who have been put through the indignity of the “justice” system — from those found guilty of traffic violations on the fraudulent, self-interested testimony of traffic cops, to people who have been blackmailed into accepting plea bargains by devious, unprincipled prosecutors.



In this case, of course, Stoddard had neither facts nor the law on his side -- just a sense of limitless privilege and a petulant frustration that Judge Donahoe refused to accept his puerile fictions. Following his Drama Queen turn in front of the press, Stoddard checked in to the Maricopa County Jail system.



With a finely tuned sense of self-promotion and unhindered by even a rudimentary sense of decency, Arpaio has used his jail system to build a reputation as "America's Toughest Sheriff" by subjecting those incarcerated therein -- most of whom have never been convicted of an actual offense -- to a steady stream of petty indignities.



Male prisoners are required to wear pink underwear; until a lawsuit ended the practice, female detainees were under constant video surveillance, including hidden cameras in the toilet facilities. Inmates are fed green bologna and forced to work in chain gangs. Many are housed in surplus military tents that offer little effective shelter from the elements. After several people charged with non-violent offenses died of culpable abuse or neglect while in Arpaio's custody, the county was forced to pay millions of dollars in legal settlements.

As one of Arpaio's brown-shirted cadres, Adam Stoddard endured none of those indignities. Citing supposed "security" concerns -- "security" being the familiar, all-purpose defense of dictators everywhere -- Arpaio refused to say exactly where Stoddard was being held. If he actually spent time behind bars it was most likely as a guest in a special, detainee-friendly facility referred to as the “Mesa Hilton." Another possibility is that Stoddard simply enjoyed a paid vacation under "house arrest" or in similarly comfortable circumstances.

To hear Stoddard's brown-shirted comrades tell the story, however, the deputy was the a modern Sir Walter Raleigh, unjustly immured in the Tower of London awaiting his grim appointment with the Headsman. Accordingly, on the morning after Stoddard was taken to "jail," twenty intrepid, public-spirited MCSO deputies suddenly called in “sick," thereby throwing the Superior Court into disarray.

Things got even nastier when an anonymous bomb threat was called in -- the first of two that would occur, along with an incident of vandalism involving pepper-spray, during Stoddard's detention. Significantly, no similar acts occurred after Stoddard's vacation-cum-jail sentence ended.

This illegal work stoppage (assuming we can torture the word "work" into describing what the MSCO does) amounted to a criminal conspiracy against the rights of those whose legal hearings were delayed. The bomb threats and pepper spray attack would be investigated as acts of terrorism had they been carried out by common citizens in support of a detainee. But the police union thugs who demanded that Stoddard be released from jail and have his record cleared acted in the serene confidence that they confronted neither personal nor professional consequences.

Tax-feeder tantrum: Maricopa County deputies stage a rally on behalf of their comrade Adam "Sticky-Fingers" Stoddard.

Maricopa County Deputy Sean Pearce, speaking on behalf of the Deputies Law Enforcement Association, didn’t flinch from describing the "sick-out" as a show of support for Stoddard: “I think it sends out a message that this officer has integrity,” Pearce insisted. “Why should he apologize for doing his job?”

The “job” in question, as defined by Pearce and his colleagues, includes stealing proprietary information, violating attorney-client confidentiality, lying about one’s actions, and defying an order to make restitution to the victim.

But Deputy Stoddard is one of the sacred personages who wear a government-issued costume and is invested with the supposed authority to kill other human beings. It’s just not right for members of that privileged elite to be treated like mere mundanes. Hence the collective tantrum thrown by Stoddard’s fellow tax-feeders -- and a serious escalation in Arpaio's unprecedented war on his critics.

As the Los Angeles Times summarizes:

"[Arpaio] recently filed a racketeering lawsuit against the entire Maricopa County power structure.... Last year, when Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon called for a federal investigation of Arpaio's immigration enforcement, the Sheriff's Office demanded to see Gordon's e-mails, phone logs and appointment calendars. When the police chief in one suburb complained about the [immigration] sweeps [carried out by Arpaio's office], Arpaio's deputies raided that town's City Hall. [There have been] two dozen instances of the sheriff launching investigations of critics, none of which led to convictions. The most notorious case involves county Supervisor Don Stapley, a Republican who has sometimes disagreed with Arpaio's immigration tactics. Last December, deputies arrested Stapley on charges of failing to disclose business interests properly on his statement of economic interest."

In filing that charge against Stapley, Arpaio -- motes-and-beams fashion -- was using the power of his office to misdirect attention from his own misrepresentations in financial disclosure reports, which -- if he and Stapley were treated alike -- would result in more than a dozen criminal counts against the sheriff.

Instead of facing an investigation for his own irregularities, Arpaio -- with the aid of the similarly megalomaniacal Maricopa County prosecutor, Andrew Thomas -- attempted to prosecute and imprison the people who had brought those irregularities to light: The reporters and editorial staff of the independent Phoenix New Times newspaper.

In August 2007, the Maricopa County Prosecutor's Office hit the Phoenix New Times with a grand jury subpoena demanding detailed information, including "Every note, tape, and record from every story written about Sheriff Arpaio by every reporter over a period of years" as well as "detailed information on anyone who has looked at the New Times Web site since 2004" as well as every individual "individual who looked at any story, review, listing, classified, or retail ad [in the publication] over a period of years."

The pretext for that act of official harassment was that the New Times, in investigating Arpaio's conflicts of interest regarding ownership of commercial properties, had violated state law by disclosing the valiant sheriff's home address.

To their credit, the editorial staff of the New Times went public with the details of that Grand Jury subpoena. That prompted Arpaio to send his Selective Enforcement Unit to arrest Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, the owners of the Phoenix New Times on a spurious charge of interfering with the deliberations of a grand jury.

The joint assault by Arpaio and Thomas on freedom of speech and the press provoked a nation-wide paroxysm of outrage that forced Thomas to free Lacey and Larkin and withdraw the charges against them. (It was later revealed that no grand jury had actually been empaneled.)

Chillin' with his homeboys: Sheriff Joe poses for a photo-op with neo-Nazi agitator Vito Lombardi.

Following Stoddard's "incarceration," Arpaio's Enemies List expanded to include Judge Gary Donahoe. County Prosecutor Thomas filed a criminal complaint against Donahoe accusing him of three felonies: Hindering prosecution, obstruction of a criminal investigation, and bribery. In a press conference called to elucidate the charges against Donahoe, Thomas found it impossible to describe a coherent theory of the case. But building a prosecutable case isn't the point in what is a transparent act of retaliation against the judge who sent one of Arpaio's Brownshirts to jail.

Arpaio and Thomas appear to believe -- or at least want the public to believe -- that they alone are untainted by the otherwise ubiquitous political corruption festering in Maricopa County. To that end they have filed a complaint against the entire County government under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute, an action that effectively designates the board of county supervisors a criminal syndicate.


With Arpaio dispatching heavily armed jackboots to intimidate and arrest his critics, and Thomas at his back prepared to mount spurious prosecutions when necessary, Maricopa County has descended into what the Goldwater Institute calls a state of "open warfare" among elected officials.


Arpaio is clearly willing to see the entire county government demolished, as long as he can erect a throne on the rubble.


"It's just extraordinary, the kind of thing that takes place in Third World dictatorships," observes former U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton, who is representing Donald Stapley. "So many people are of one mind on a single issue -- illegal immigration -- that they are willing to ignore [Arpaio's] misdeeds."

The face of "immigration enforcement" in Maricopa County: How would you like to see this guy busting down your door at the break of dawn?

Arpaio was actually seen by some as a liberal regarding illegal immigration prior to 2005. That year saw two critical changes: First, Arpaio re-cast himself as a crusader for border security, and second, he received a federal 287(g) waiver empowering his deputies to enforce federal immigration laws.


Since then, Arpaio has turned Maricopa County into a literal police state in which anybody who "looks" or "sounds" like an illegal immigrant -- including U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents of Mexican ancestry -- can be summarily arrested and detained. While Arpaio's deputies -- who often conduct their raids wearing ski masks -- are focusing their attention on people whose sole offense is to work in Arizona without official permission, more than 70,000 criminal warrants, many of which deal with actual offenses against persons and property, have been left unenforced.


Maricopa County under the reign of Arpaio has become a community in which a mother can be seized from her car at gunpoint by goons in ski masks while her children shriek in terror. In Arpaio's realm, a woman nine months pregnant can be hauled away to jail in handcuffs and leg irons on minor, non-violent charges, forced to deliver her child while chained to a hospital bed, and then kept separated from her newborn for more than two months -- because she is suspected of being an illegal immigrant.


Earlier this year the federal government formally revoked the "authority" provided by the 287(g) waiver and instructed Arpaio that he could no longer use his personnel to enforce federal immigration laws.



The following day, Arpaio conducted one of his notorious "immigration sweeps," an exercise in which deputies "descend on heavily Latino neighborhoods, arrest hundreds of people for violations as minor as a busted headlight and ask them whether they are in the country legally," reported the Los Angeles Times.


"I wanted to show everybody it didn't make a difference," explained Arpaio -- quite redundantly, as it happened, for those who have come to understand that the superannuated dictator of Maricopa County answers only to himself.


A few years ago, in an essay that eventually cost me my job, I warned that the issue of illegal immigration was being exploited by the Regime to consolidate police state powers at both the federal and local levels. My colleagues at the time were of the opinion (candidly expressed by one of them in an e-mail) that it would be acceptable for the U.S. to become a police state within "secure" borders. I wasn't willing to settle for that arrangement, a microcosm of which is being created in Maricopa County under Arpaio.



The slice of the public most obsessed over the issue of illegal immigration -- what I've referred to as the "punitive populist" element of the Republican coalition -- seemed to think it would be possible to expand federal police power selectively: The Regime would build a border fence, dispatch armed enforcement agents to roust people from workplaces, impose new bureaucratic impositions on struggling businesses and new restrictions on travel -- but all of this would target only the "illegals" without threatening the rights of the rest of us.



But to paraphrase Edmund Burke, police-state methods, once tolerated, are soon institutionalized. What do we gain if every illegal immigrant is sent home -- and we end up living under a near-replica of the third world dictatorships those people had fled?



Joe Arpaio is the law enforcement equivalent of the geologic formation called a "terminal moraine" -- a huge mound of accreted debris piled up through the advance of a glacier. A core sample of Arpaio's decades-long long enforcement career would reveal layer upon layer of thuggish presumption, facile corruption, contempt for the Constitution, and indifference to any consideration other than his privileged status.



Arpaio is chiefly a problem for the county that has repeatedly voted him into office since 1992. But the tactics he is employing to retain his position might well engender mimicry in other counties as budgets tighten and political conflicts over dwindling tax revenues grow acute.



With the Feds pouring money and military equipment into "local" law enforcement departments nation-wide, Arpaio's literal war against Maricopa County's political leadership may eventually provide a template for similar putsches elsewhere.

UPDATE: JBS Joins Arpaio's Jackboot Parade

The New American magazine, which once published hard-hitting investigative journalism with an unabashed commitment to preserving individual liberty, has apparently decided to become a press organ for the Mussolini of Maricopa County.


This rip-and-read regurgitation of Arpaio's talking points comes amid news that 77-year-old Arpaio is the preferred choice of Arizona Republicans to run for governor. So it appears that TNA and the management of its sponsoring organization, the John Birch Society, are once again trying to ride a Red State Fascist "wave."


I use the term "fascist" here not as a lazy pejorative, but in a specific sense. Arpaio is literally waging war on the rule of law on the assumption that he and his armed minions are the law in Maricopa County. The sloppy French kiss of a "news" item run in TNA promotes the notion that Arpaio must be a good guy, because leftists hate him so passionately -- a trope very closely related to the Dear Leader/Great Man school of authoritarian collectivism.


If The New American were still in the business of investigative journalism -- or critical opinion journalism of any kind -- they would have examined Arpaio's record just a little more carefully, rather than retailing his self-serving bromides. If they were committed to individual liberty protected by law, they would be joining Arpaio's critics, rather than carrying a banner in his torchlight parade.

Second Update, December 18

In a post at the end of the thread dangling from The New American's borderline Brokeback Mountain embrace of Joe Arpaio, a fellow named J.E. Andreasen provides the following invaluable perspective:

"I have been a resident of Maricopa County since 1959, and a freedom activist since 1974. I have taken college instruction under MCSO [Maricopa County Sheriff's Office] senior management personnel. I have had superb personal assistance from MCSO officials [who] later were viciously destroyed for their decency and honor.

Simply put, Joe Arpaio is the worst nightmare for those ancestors who established the office of Sheriff as the top law enforcement official in a given county.

He has used his experience in federal law enforcement to create a private army, answerable to no one, egged on by every Nativist drone and `C-minus' LEO butt-licker in metropolitan Phoenix.

What these sub-genius folks don't yet realize is that he considers EVERY PERSON within his reach to be a "pre-arrested" criminal. His hubris is absolutely without limit, and is only matched by his contempt for human liberty and the constraints of a Constitutional Republic. None are safe from his gaze; not even his praetorian guard."

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Dum spiro, pugno!