Arizona Judge Tells Sheriff "Reveal Password Or Face Contempt" 624
An anonymous reader writes "Four days ago, deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona conducted a raid against the county government building hosting computers for a law enforcement database. After threatening to arrest county employees who would stop them, the officers proceeded to secure the room and promptly changed passwords on many of the servers. In a hearing on Friday, a Superior Court judge threatened to hold members of the Sheriff's Office in contempt if they did not reveal the passwords by next Wednesday. Following this, the Sheriff's Office claimed to be conducting an investigation against other Superior Court judges. Courts have asked for passwords before, but never under conditions like this."
Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:4, Informative)
Summary doesn't make it clear that the Sheriff in question is Joe Arpaio, a sadistic, authoritarian monster that that believes in making prison as demeaning and painful affair as possible no matter what the offense. He's a sick, twisted psychopath that needs to be stopped at all cost.
Correct link for article discussing contempt claim (Score:5, Informative)
The correct article is here [azcentral.com].
Amazing this is happening in the United States
Arpaio (Score:5, Informative)
This raid looks pretty outrageous. The court is probably the least politicized and most appropriate agency to take control until the situation can be resolved. The silver lining to this is that it is so outrageous that it may finally get that madman Arpaio removed from office.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, forgot link:
http://www.arpaio.com/index.php [arpaio.com]
There's a reason this asshole has such a critical website over him. I firmly believe he's a sociopath.
Re:Correct link for article discussing contempt cl (Score:2, Informative)
Amazing that you think it's amazing this is happening in the United States.
Re:Do they really need the password? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes they do have an IT guy. Appears he built the system. No I don't believe he does need the password. But he is reported to have told the judge it would be "convenient" to have it but that he didn't really need it.
Hendershott Could End Up in Jail Next Week in Showdown Over Password [phoenixnewtimes.com]
That's why the US isn't a democracy (Score:5, Informative)
It is a Constitutional Federal Republic. This means that there are various check on the majority. 50.0001% of people can't vote to oppress the other 49.9999%. Things like constitutional law can only be changed by a very lengthy process (66% of both congressional bodies, 75% of all states have to approve it).
So while the majority may agree with what he's doing, or at least the parts of what he's doing they are aware of, that doesn't make it right, or legal. He has, on many occasions, been sued successfully for various rights violations.
It is something that needs to be fought, not something that people should just say "Well the majority elected him. Doesn't matter that they did, he is still accountable to the law. That's how the system is setup.
Re:You've seen maricopa before (Score:5, Informative)
In more convenient linked form: Phoenix Police Seize PCs of a Blogger Critical of the Department [slashdot.org]
What the hell is going on there? Do people actually support this BS?
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a Brit living in Arizona, I can assure you he is NOT popular across all the state.
His constituents in Phoenix, however, think the sun shines out of his arse.
This also explains a lot about Phoenix in general.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:5, Informative)
People waiting for trial are not 'criminals'. He has had over half a dozen deaths in custody this year along for people who were not convicted of a crime. County jails should be equivalent in comfort, food and atmosphere to a Motel 6 till you are convicted, imho.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:5, Informative)
He gets a certain cash amount from the Feds per prisoner to keep them in his 'jails', a bunch of tent cities, population over 4,000. He spends the absolute minimum on these and runs them in a manner consistent with German concentration camps (without the poison gas showers; he doesn't want to kill his prisoners, he wants the money from it), thus creating a cash surplus he uses to make sure his department has enough weapons to take over a Third World country. You can get thrown into one of his 'jails' by having a couple outstanding parking tickets, or defaulting on your child support payments.
As a resident of Arizona, he makes me ashamed to live here.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:4, Informative)
I agree with that sentiment, but Arpaio is accountable for witholding insulin for diabetics, turning paraplegics into quadraplegics, killing at least two mentally handicapped prisoners with multiple taserings, spit bagging, and excessive restraints.
There's a very distinct and wide line between the barbarism he displays and not pandering to inmates that you're proposing (and I agree with).
CJIS - Criminal Justice Information System (Score:4, Informative)
Disclaimer - I work as the IT manager for a major university police department.
Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS) Security Policy - the governing policy from the Department of Justice for managing criminal justice systems. The policy is law enforcement sensitive and not public.
The Sheriffs office is arguing that that the law requires this server, which has NCIC (National Crime Information Center) access, to only be managed by a criminal justice agency. There are entire previsions in CJIS that allow for delegation of CJIS management to noncriminal justice agencies including municipal governments and contractors. The only provision states that responsibility for management of security and network control remains with the criminal justice agency - meaning the blame for not following the CJIS security policy lies with the law enforcement agency.
Unless Arizona has different laws regarding NCIC access this looks like a power grab to me...
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a Brit living in Arizona, I can assure you he is NOT popular across all the state.
His constituents in Phoenix, however, think the sun shines out of his arse.
This also explains a lot about Phoenix in general.
I dont think he's popular in Britian either, not after trying to extradite law abiding british citizens and threaten to humiliate them [extradition.org.uk]
Re:Mods, please be responsible. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:4, Informative)
According to www.arpaio.com, Arpaio himself commissioned a study by a college to determine his return statistics (using tax payer money of course) and the college determined that the rates for repeat offenders were no different from the average.
Also keep in mind, that "tent city" thing he's got set up doesn't just house convicted criminals, it also houses people who are waiting for their court date to appear, and were unable to make bond.
Besides, I thought prison was supposed to be about rehabilitation anyway, not so much just a punishment. If it were just punishment you were after, why not shoot everybody in the leg for crimes up to rape or murder, and shoot everybody at or above that level.
Re:Coverup (Score:3, Informative)
Given Joe's history, I'm very interested in what's on those servers. This is a guy who thinks ANY press is good press. Even when he had to pay 30-something percent of an 800k judgement due to abuse out of his own pocket. The guy's got corruption all over the place, and he's still in office.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:5, Informative)
People should not die in custody and especially should not while awaiting trial. ---- note the period
The US has more deaths in custody than almost any other first-world country but Britain is damn close because of the number of heroin-related deaths there. Deaths in custody after the introduction of the taser in both countries rose as deaths related to overdose, homicide by police officer, cardiac-arrest and many others increased substantially. The taser is over-used and mis-used and police are killing people because of it. Don't be an apologist for murderers, it makes you look like a monster.
Re:Mods, please be responsible. (Score:4, Informative)
Because Joe Arpaio is a power-tripping constitution-ignoring murderously negligent nutjob ?
The man is batshit insane, not unlike what you would get if the Bush family pursued ferocious inbreeding for the next ten generations. Then you take that mentally stunted child, give him a government job and a gun, and let him loose upon the world.
This is a man who gets his goons to physically threaten press reporters, when they get too close to his dirty secrets, and when he's done intimidating these law-abiding journalists, he saddles their offices with "punitive" over-reaching FOIA requests. He's perfectly happy to do the same thing to judges and state officials he dislikes. He's like a gangster with federal employee ID.
Re:On behalf of arizona... (Score:5, Informative)
There's a great expose [newyorker.com] on Sheriff Joe in a recent New Yorker that argues quite the opposite; his obsession with his own self-aggrandizement has eclipsed attacks on real crime in favor of a sensational (and indulgently predatory) approach to law enforcement.
Re:That's why the US isn't a democracy (Score:5, Informative)
"They demonstrated [to the district court] that the conditions in that [Maricopa County] prison were inhumane and degrading, and that an Icelandic decision to grant the extradition request would therefore conflict with their rights under Article 68 paragraph 1 of the [Icelandic] Constitution, which prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; Article 3 of the European Human Rights Convention, and Article 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Supreme Court sustained the view that the legal requirements for extradition were not fulfilled[.]"
(Interim report of the Icelandic Government to the European Committee Against Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT), 1999) http://eng.domsmalaraduneyti.is/reports/nr/126 [domsmalaraduneyti.is]
Re:You've seen maricopa before (Score:1, Informative)
Different group of cops. Phoenix PD is not Maricopa County Sheriffs Department. MCSD can and doesn't go everywhere in the county while Phoenix PD only goes within the city limits of Phoenix. If you didn't know, most of what people think of as Phoenix is really about a dozen or so different cities that just run right up onto each other.
Re:bizare turn of events (Score:4, Informative)
Okay, tracked it down. The column you quote is by the late Alan Stang. He was a right-wing extremist, not a lawyer, not an expert on law or government. He's not a reliable source.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:5, Informative)
Some would argue he has already gotten several people killed. And Charles Agster [wikipedia.org] was not some kid caught riding in a stolen car or with a bag of dope. Ambria Spencer's daughter certainly didn't commit any crimes. Richard Post really was caught with dope but he wasn't killed. Instead, the guards broke his neck turning him into a quadriplegic, and then they went on to laugh about it.
Re:How did they get control of the servers? (Score:5, Informative)
Huh. It's safest just to let Sheriff Joe arrest you and fight it in court. Juan Mendoza Farias thought that too [phoenixnewtimes.com].
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:4, Informative)
In some countries like Norway, rehabilitation actually works [youtube.com].
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:4, Informative)
Note -- not prison, jail.
The people in his jail are waiting trial or serving time for misdemeanors. Hardly the civilization- devouring monsters of Sheriff Joe's imagination.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:2, Informative)
Wait... you mean he took away their salt and nudy magazines?! [newyorker.com] Oh the horror!!
For all the great descriptive words being thrown about, I see no links with any evidence of anything wrong with this guy.
he hasn't decreased crime (Score:5, Informative)
It's wishful thinking. The East Valley Tribune won a pulitzer for an expose [74.125.155.132] of Sheriff Joe's tactics that concluded, among other things, that his focus on illegal immigration has actually stolen the focus away from violent crimes.
Re:Mods, please be responsible. (Score:1, Informative)
> except you don't vote for sheriffs. or any other police officers.
> should this change? probably.
huh? in the US you do. the county sheriff is an elected position.
Re:That's why the US isn't a democracy (Score:3, Informative)
I see what you did there, only problem is you stopped short. The wise and mighty wiki says, "A republic is a form of government in which the head of state is not a monarch and the people (or at least a part of its people) have an impact on its government emphasis mine. So please try again.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:4, Informative)
It's wishful thinking. The recidivism under "Sheriff Joe" isn't substantially lower then under the previous Sheriff. Plus, you have the fact that he's focusing so much on arresting illegal immigrants, that it's actually affecting how well they are working against other crimes.
Re:FWIW (Score:2, Informative)
It appears that enforcing the law is becoming more and more unpopular as the propaganda of the original article indicates. The other side of the story was completely left out, which is a form of lying by way of omission. See Arpaio wants feds to investigate county [ktar.com]. It turns out that the security for the computers is the responsibility of the Sheriff's department and they were denied access. Oops, looks the it was the County trying a power grab, not the Sheriff's department.
You have to wonder why people think they can get away with this type of propaganda when just about everybody has a search engine at their finger tips.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:5, Informative)
That's funny because I'm sitting in my tent in Afghanistan at this very moment, and it's equipped with an air conditioning unit just like all the other tents. I've been to some of the smallest, shittiest FOBs in this country and haven't yet seen one where the commander is so inhumane as to require his soldiers to sleep in a bare tent in 115+ degree weather. The other day the power went out when it was 100 degrees out and within a matter of minutes the heat inside was un-fucking-bearable.
Re:On behalf of arizona... (Score:3, Informative)
> Funny. Joe Arpaio enforces the law so well that the drug gangs and illegal immigrant smugglers' gangs are trying to kill him, and the illegal alien amnesty crowd is constantly bankrolling name-smearing campaigns against him.
You're nuts. I'm against him because he's incompetent, self-aggrandizing and is costing Arizona taxpayers MILLIONS because he can't do his damn job right. You're just trying to make this political. I'm a Republican. I've never been anything else. I hate him because he's incompetent. Knee-jerk jerks like you giving us incompetent nutjobs like this are the problem.
Hint: having people trying to kill you is NOT a sign that you're doing a good job! It means you're hated, not that you're effective. If he was so damned effective, he wouldn't have screwed up that big prostitution sting, now, would he? If he was so damned effective, we'd have a lower recidivism rate. If he was so damned effective, he wouldn't have burned down that house during the botched raid, killed their dog, and run over the neighbor's car with his tank.
People like you who care more about the R next to their name than making sure we have someone competent in charge? It's your fault the Republican party is half dead.
Re:Arpaio (Score:3, Informative)
Here in Alabama, the county coroner is an elected position. It requires no legal or medical experience, but it does have one important feature for cases like this: the coroner is the only county official that can legally arrest the sheriff.
Re:Mods, please be responsible. (Score:4, Informative)
A) They're FOIA requests (not FAIO).
B) He sends them against elected Phoenix officials, like the mayor, whose email he requests for political reasons. He does NOT send FOIA requests to journalists as is incorrectly claimed by GP.
C) That said, Joe does appear to lean on journalists, but he does that with search warrants and deputies. Slashdot has covered this in the past and there is much information to be found on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] concerning the incidents of note.
Basically, he's an incompetent Sheriff who hasn't been voted out because too many people are too enamored with his "tough on crime" stance to notice that he's completely incompetent and not making the people of Arizona any safer. They'll try to defend him by claiming that the opposition is in favor of illegal immigration or some other utterly political nonsense, while ignoring the fact that his incompetence has cost Arizona taxpayers something like $100 million.
(That's a very rough estimate using the sources on Wikipedia, but it's about the right order of magnitude, especially when you count what we pay for legal liability insurance and Arizona's insanely high deductibles).
Re:If you don't mind going to jail... (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately some people have died under suspicious circumstances in Sheriff Joe's jail cells.
Re:On behalf of arizona... (Score:4, Informative)
Don't be afraid of the Phoenix Police. Be afraid of the imposters [azcentral.com].
In Phoenix, you stand a good change of being the victim of a home invasion staged by Mexican Army Regulars [wordpress.com]...
Or Mexicans in Phoenix police drag [stratfor.com], fulfilling their contracts...
Or Phoenix Police whose chief and the Phoenix mayor just can't take much criticism [infowars.com].
Try and discredit the reports based on the sources I use. Not working. The incidents did happen. Police officers were calling into local radio shows and confirming the reports.
It seems most home invasions in Phoenix are carried out by those who attack drop houses the 'coyotes' use to stage illegal immigrants on their way to other cities. Taking some hostage and making a quick buck is the motive. Posing as police works very well until the real police show up. then, hope the bad guys run out of bullets, which they often do.
Our mayor, Phil Gordon, is death against enforcing immigration law, as is our former Governor and now head of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano. It's so bad the Feds are demanding that local law enforcement accept a new policy that pretty much prevents [azfamily.com] them from enforcing the law. That's the 287(g) program that apparently is too successful.
Sherrif Joe also has tangled with the local alternative paper [phoenixnewtimes.com], which published [phoenixnewtimes.com] his and other officials home addresses and apparently violated [democratic...ground.com] grand jury statutes. It's only an arcane law when it is applied to you.
Sherrif Joe has his view of law enforcement. It enrages many of the liberal intelligensia around here, who would rather we put the illegals up in the Phoenician and give them a chance.
Me? I back Sherrif Joe, knowing full well he can get carried away. The alternative is to have everything not nailed down stolen by the illegals as they stream through here on their way to a better life.
At least he doesn't PRETEND [wordpress.com] to be doing his job.
You ought to live here. Then you would grasp a little more of the nuance. Much too easy to take things at face value. 4 years here has taught me that we have a serious illegal immigration problem. How to solve it is unfortunately simple - clean house, starting with the House of Reperesentatives. Our government has too many conflicts of interest, business sees illegals as cheap labor, Democrats see them as new voters, and regular citizens have no one on their side. But I'm not hopeful.
Why the focus on illegal immigration? That's the crux of the trouble over Sherrif Joe. That's all it is.
Bring it on.
Re:On behalf of arizona... (Score:3, Informative)
Go outside. pick of a good-sized rock. That's a lethal weapon. Pick up a branch. Lethal weapon. Etc, etc. Almost ANYTHING can be a lethal weapon if used by the right person. Sure, granny might not able to kill you with a rock, but a muscular 20-year old could easily do so.
Guns, on the other hand, even the playing field. Yes, a muscular 20-year old might shoot you, but granny can use the gun to protect herself, too.
And that is better how? I'd much prefer that, if I was the victim of a drive-by, the attackers only had easy access to rocks.
Also, if a rock are so lethal, maybe you should suggest to the army that you can help them out with cheap new weapons in Afghanistan.
Face it, a gun is purely designed to maim or kill. It is not a tool and is not designed for any other purpose. The US currently has a worse homicide rate than Albania, Ethiopia, the Ivory Coast and Palestine [wikipedia.org] - and far worse than any other industrialised nation. Please get some reality.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:4, Informative)
In the first gulf war we slept and lived in tents without airconditioning in the middle of summer (think Marines). The Air Force, not 2 miles away, had all air conditioned tents.
I'm glad to hear you're treated better than we were. It was effing miserable.
Re:On behalf of arizona... (Score:4, Informative)
No, you don't EVEN wanna live in Maricopa County. Get too many parking tickets, you'll spend time in Tent City awaiting trial. Get caught tossing a cigarette or styrofoam coffee cup out the window onto a county road, spend some time in Tent City awaiting trial. Be a day late making your insurance payment for your car, the insurance company notifies the DoT computers of the lapse in coverage, the DoT notifies your county sheriff, and a deputy comes out to pull the plates off your car while it's in your driveway, and in Maricopa County, you can go to Tent City to await appearing before a judge.
Re:That's why the US isn't a democracy (Score:1, Informative)
The "Inmate Deaths and Injuries" section of his wikipedia article is worth a read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Arpaio#Inmate_deaths_and_injuries
The list includes a blind man who was beaten to death by his cops during the arrest, a 9-month pregnant woman who was brutalized by cops until she miscarried in the police station, a middle-aged diagnosed diabetic woman who was denied insulin until she died of diabetic shock, and paraplegic whose neck was broken by cops (turning him into a quadriplegic), among countless others. His prisons (particularly Tent City, which houses both convicts and people who are awaiting trial) are deliberately set up for prisoners to kill each other - leaving rebar tent-stakes available even after several riots in which prisoners killed each other with them.
Arpaio either needs to be shot or incarcerated in the same facilities he runs.
Re:On behalf of arizona... (Score:3, Informative)
Switzerland also requires each person with a gun to undergo rigorous and ongoing training. If that were a requirement in the US I wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with it. Also, each bullet in Switzerland is accounted for.
Despite all this, they still managed to have a pretty gruesome public massacre not that long ago.
Personally, I'd choose the place with the fewest guns every time. Even though it seems to be true that adjusting the mix of gun distribution in gun-heavy societies can improve murder stats, it's also true that having as few as possible almost invariably makes the stats far, far better still. Unfortunately, it's probably too late to do anything about this in the US; years of unenlightened firearm policy has already rendered the country a public-safety writeoff.
Re:I am curious (Score:1, Informative)
Good grief. Joe Arpaio really is an amazing individual. He has some sort of superpower that makes idiots believe his side of the story no matter what, even though a little diligence and research makes it obvious how corrupt he is. Like his bragging about how little he spends on feeding his prisoners, giving them spoiled food with inadequate nutrition. Authoritarian morons drool at this, because they love to see "bad guys" mistreated (and are too stupid to take note of the fact that these people mostly have not been convicted and are awaiting trial and, in some cases, may not have even been charged with anything yet). Meanwhile, those in his jail can actually get additional food by buying it in the commisary. From what I've read, the profits from the commissary are not actually accounted for anywhere.
Re:Summary doesn't make it clear... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I have to start with the fact that Margaret Singers 'Studies' on cults and thought control have been pretty thoroughly debunked. I'm not a rabid non-believer, but Phillip Zimbardo has a lot more empirical research supporting his (much more limited) thesis of how people are influenced, and her work has, at best, not stood the test of time.
So, the mere fact that there are forms of rehabilitation with good track records does a pretty good job of distinguishing it from Margaret Singer's 'Thought Control' Thesis. Her theories don't play out in the real world.
Moreover, however intuitively obvious it might be, the track record of 'just punishment' as a method for preventing crime is abysmal. It's hard to separate the lousy record in general from the fact that the average 'just punishment' for a crime averages in melanin and income too - it seems to be 'just' to give high income white people shorter sentences than low income black people, even for identical crimes - if I was being *really* sophist I would say the lower recidivism rate of people with shorter sentences proves that harsh sentencing has a negative effect on recidivism, but I'll be good and say it's a compounding factor that makes it difficult to estimate the effects.
However you *can* judge the effects in a given area of changes in the law, and there's no correlation with longer sentencing and lower crime rate -or- lower recidivism. There just isn't - end of story.
Like other right-wing myths like 'welfare queens', 'No one would confess to a crime they didn't commit', and 'torturing terrorists will get good intelligence', just ain't so.
Just to stop the inevitable accusations of pulling data from 'pansy liberal textbooks' my 'pansy liberal professor' in "Criminal Justice" was a large, muscular black man that has helped run maximum security prisons in the Mid-West. He could kick 'my arse', 'your arse', and 'both our arses, together'.
Just sayin' - Pug
Re:On behalf of arizona... (Score:2, Informative)
Thats the issue with so much gun control. They want to ban guns to just law enforcment in the US or do something similarly drastic, but the issue is that a criminal isn't going into your local gun shop to have a background check done. The only thing putting heavy restrictions on the gun purchasing will do is make it take longer for me to buy a new gun.