Sheriff Joe: the child molester’s friend
by digby
He was too busy designing the inmates’ pink underwear, I guess:
Sheriff Arpaio, the top law enforcement official in sprawling Maricopa County, is perhaps best known for his hard-nosed treatment of prisoners and his aggressive raids aimed at illegal immigrants. But it is his department’s approach to more than 400 sex-crimes cases that has Sheriff Arpaio in trouble.
His deputies failed to investigate or conducted only the sketchiest of inquiries into hundreds of sex crimes between 2005 and 2007, investigations by Arizona law enforcement agencies have shown. Many of those cases involved molested children.
The cases were first raised by The East Valley Tribune in 2008 but resurfaced in the news media earlier this year and in a recent article by The Associated Press, which prompted Sheriff Arpaio to defend himself at a news conference. “If there were any victims, I apologize to those victims,” he said on Monday, vowing to hold deputies accountable.
He’s 79 years old and should be retired anyway. But the people who voted for him all these years are going to hell right along with him. He’s a sadist and a bigot and that’s what they liked about him.
When you see all these patriarchal institutions being revealed as either perpetrating sex crimes or covering them up you have to believe that this has been one of the biggest secrets of the human experience.It’s just not reasonable to think that all these people just started molesting kids or seeing it as no big deal. It must have always been like this and is only coming to light in this era of openness. After all, these institutions were much more insular before. That’s a startling thought isn’t it?
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