commentary by Patrick H. Moore
Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, AZ, has been a lightning rod for controversy since first being elected sheriff of Maricopa County in 1992. Some of his bizarre practices have included his Tent City Jail for inmates awaiting sentencing, his Citizen’s Posse, his alleged racial profiling of Latinos, and his failure to take sex crimes against children seriously.
Now, according to multiple news services and websites, Sheriff Joe, who is certainly one of the most federally-investigated sheriffs in US history, has a new can of worms wriggling around on his desk which he may or may not be forced to swallow.
It seems that one of Sheriff Joe’s deputies, Ramon “Charley” Armendariz, may have been in the habit of ingesting methamphetamine and possibly other drugs. In any event, he certainly stockpiled plenty of drugs at his residence. Armendariz’ story hit the “flashpoint” in early May of this year.
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office reports that an investigation of Mr. Armendariz began on May 1st when he brought attention on himself by calling Phoenix police to report a burglary in progress at his residence. Nothing strange about this at first blush, but according to Deputy Sheriff, Joakin Enriquez, when the Phoenix police arrived at his house, they found Mr. Armendariz armed with a pepper ball gun chasing a phantom burglar around the premises.
On the one hand, the fact that Mr. Armendariz was apparently merely going to “mace” the burglar rather than gun him down is very much to his credit, but that may not entirely offset the fact he was chasing a phantom burglar around his property. There was nobody there.
Now when something like this happens, there are probably only two plausible explanations. Either the target is in the throes of acute major mental illness, or the target is experiencing methamphetamine- induced psychosis.
What is unclear is how the local police managed to convince Armendariz that there was no burglar. Perhaps they all sat down, shared the glass pipe, and discussed it like rational men. In any event, they reportedly found drugs on the premises and arrested Armenidariz.
Sheriff Joe himself describes what went down: “This situation started last Thursday when he called in about burglars around his house. When our deputies went in there found drugs. He resigned on Friday. He was evaluated again for mental condition and he was released from jail.”
Armendariz resigned his post on Friday, May 2nd after nine years with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
An investigation was launched which led to law enforcement obtaining a search warrant. When the warrant was served, the officers found marijuana, heroin, and methamphetamine. Armendariz was booked on drug charges.
The lesson here is that you should never give law enforcement a reason to get you in their crosshairs, because once they’re on to you, they may be reluctant to let go. The police returned to Armendariz’ residence near 31st Avenue and Thunderbird Road on Sunday evening, only to find that the suspect had barricaded himself inside his residence. Admirable restraint was exercised and after a five hour standoff, Armendariz walked out of his home just after 1 a.m. on Monday, May 5th. He was taken into custody and to a psychiatric unit for evaluation, according to Phoenix Police Officer James Holmes.
Things Got Much Worse
Three days later Mr. Armendariz was dead. Sheriff Joe explained that “Charley” apparently hanged himself. By this point, law enforcement had been to his home four times in the past nine days. He was supposed to get an ankle monitor on Wednesday May 7th, but never showed up to get “outfitted”, which led to another trip out to his house which is when he was found dead.
Now if drugs were all that were found at Armendariz’s house, this could be chalked up as simply another case of cop goes rogue and gets hooked on drugs which leads to his demise.
This is not the case, however. KTAR.Com explains:
When Ramon Armendariz hanged himself, he left behind a house full of questions.
Among the items at his house were a stash of drugs, evidence bags from old cases, hundreds of fake IDs and thousands of his video-recorded traffic stops that were withheld in a racial-profiling case against his boss, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Now, the quest for answers has raised the possibility that a yet-to-be-determined number of his cases could be thrown out and has refocused attention on Arpaio and his department, already under close watch by a federal monitor in the profiling case.
The judge overseeing the case has raised the prospect that Armendariz may have been shaking down people living in the U.S. illegally during traffic stops, and Bill Montgomery, the top prosecutor in Phoenix described the situation as a “mess” as his staff begins to sort it out.
Sheriff Joe’s lawyer says the agency’s hope is that Armendariz was a lone rogue officer. “I don’t know what triggered him,” said Sheriff Joe, whose territory obviously includes the Phoenix area.
The reason Sheriff Joe’s lawyer hopes that Armendariz turns out to be merely “a long rogue officer” is because Armendariz was formerly part of Sheriff Joe’s human smuggling unit, which was in actually, at least in part, a group of rogue officers under Joe’s command that used racial profiling to arrest illegal immigrants.
Although Sheriff Joe is still very popular with his rank-and-file law-and-order constituency, there is considerable evidence that he may be one of Arizona’s more prolific lawbreakers. He has been accused of numerous crimes including abuse of power, misuse of funds, failure to investigate sex crimes, improper clearance of cases, unlawful enforcement of immigration laws, and election law violations.
In addition, Sheriff Joe has been found guilty of racial profiling in Federal Court, which led to a monitor being appointed to oversee MCSO operations. The Department of Justice concluded that Arpaio oversaw the worst pattern of racial profiling in U.S. history, and subsequently filed suit against him for unlawful discriminatory police conduct.
The key court order mandates which the MCSO must now follow in order to avoid racial profiling include the following: The deputy sheriffs must mount cameras on every police car and must radio in the reason for stopping a driver before officers can approach the vehicle. They must also record all stops with audio and video, and are barred from using traffic stop quotas.
Furthermore, and this is important, Arpaio and his officers cannot rely “on a suspect’s speaking Spanish, or speaking English with an accent, or appearance as a day laborer as a factor in developing reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe a person has committed or is committing any crime, or reasonable suspicion to believe that an individual is in the country without authorization.”
In other words, MC Deputy Sheriff’s cannot racially profile Latinos and then make unauthorized traffic stops in hopes of finding something suspicious.
Back to Ramon Armendariz
The reason Ramon Armendariz’ scandalous conduct is important, and could be a thorn in Sheriff Joe’s side now, is because as a member of the sheriff’s “human smuggling unit”, Armendariz was asked to testify in a lawsuit against the sheriff’s office that alleged that deputies used racial profiling to arrest dozens of illegal immigrants. In other words, Armendariz testified at the hearing that led to Sheriff Joe being found guilty of racial profiling, which resulted in 1) the new rules for traffic stops and, 2) the monitor being assigned to make sure the rules are followed. Subsequent to his testimony, Mr. Armendariz left the human smuggling unit.
Cecillia Wang, a lawyer who took part in the profiling case, believes that Sheriff Joe’s office is compromised (well, duh!) and should not be spearheading the investigation into Armendariz’ rampant misconduct. “A law enforcement agency that launches this kind of investigation shouldn’t have stated a desired outcome,” said Wang, the desired outcome on the part of Sheriff Joe’s contingency being to demonstrate, if at all possible, that Armendariz was simply a rogue cop and that his egregious across-the- board criminal conduct was simply an isolated case of one cop breaking bad, and that Charley’s actions do not reflect upon the already questionable (and heavily questioned) operations of Sheriff Joe and his crew.
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Arizona is so far to the right that even the criminal defense attorneys handling the big drug trafficking cases are generally card-carrying Republicans. It’s no doubt hard for an “outsider” such as myself to really grasp what’s going on down there (over there?). (It was “up there” in the case of Ramon Armendariz.)
When I first went to work in criminal defense, one day The Boss referred to Arizona as the “Republic of Arizona.” His point was that, perhaps more than any other state, Arizona marches to the beat of its own drummer, and that drummer’s rhythm is out of step with much of the rest of the country.
This was long before I had heard of Sheriff Joe, Tent City, pink boxers and all his other bizarre machinations.
Live and learn, I guess. Meanwhile Charley Armendariz won’t be chasing any other phantom burglars around his property. And, of course, the crowning irony is the fact that by reporting the burglary to local law enforcement, he, in effect, turned himself in, which led quickly to his unfortunate demise.