Information Blockade

They tried to get Los Angeles County to transfer Paris Hilton to Arpaio's lockup when she was incarcerated for a probation violation based on a drunk-driving conviction. They put on an "Inmate Idle" competition inside the Tent City jail.

By the nature of some of his antics, you might think the "toughest sheriff in America" has a sense of humor.

He doesn't. Though he can dish out plenty of abuse, when the tables are turned, a reporter who offends him might be treated to a visit from the sheriff's Selective Enforcement Unit (formerly known as the Threat Assessment squad).

On September 19, 2006, the same month the potential child rapist stalked his would-be victims in Avondale, Fabiola Montoya-Vallesteros slipped out of a window at her uncle's house in Buckeye.

The teenage girl wasn't running away — she was mentally disabled and soon got lost as she wandered around the rural desert in western Maricopa County. The Sheriff's Office, after receiving a call about the missing girl, put out a news bulletin to the media. Some media, that is.

"There was a big search. We didn't receive the news," said Lili Antonini, a reporter with La Onda, a Spanish-language radio station at 1190 AM.

Antonini says she learned of the search-and-rescue operation after someone told her they had heard about it on TV. Antonini knew the immediacy and long reach of radio might help the girl. Perhaps someone tuned in to La Onda would be driving around and see the child.

But the Sheriff's Office wouldn't give her any information, and that meant she couldn't give her listeners any.

Later that day, the girl was found safe about a mile from her relatives' house. But the situation bothered Antonini, who wondered what might have happened if Fabiola had remained lost.

It was just one example of the MCSO's sticking it to La Onda. There are many others, says the reporter, who has worked at the station for two years.

In September, visitors and some staff at the county's Fourth Avenue Jail were temporarily evacuated after someone phoned in a bomb threat. The Sheriff's Office sent a mass e-mail to everyone on his list of preferred media.

Again, Antonini heard about the evacuation second-hand. And too late to produce a timely report. This was just the type of breaking news Antonini thought was important to her listeners, especially if a real bomb had been in play. Any person visiting or walking near the jail would have wanted to know about the perilous situation.

Since he doesn't talk to New Times, it's impossible to get Sheriff Arpaio's perspective on why his office won't send alerts on bomb threats, missing children or other crucial news to La Onda. Antonini says she once sat down with sheriff's spokesman Chagolla to discuss why the MCSO has shut out her radio station.

"He wanted to know what our ratings were, what our listenership was," Antonini says. Chagolla didn't need to ask who the station's listenership was.

Antonini and station manager Laura Madrid speculate that a factor in blacklisting La Onda is its editorial stance. The women insist La Onda's news reports aren't biased, but the station does air pro-immigrant commentary.

There's no question that immigration is the top issue for people in Antonini's audience, many of whom are from south of the border. Talk shows on her station, including the youthful "El Break," often feature hosts and guests who rip Arpaio's attack on migrants.

It's unknown how many people living in Maricopa County speak only Spanish. One poll estimates that there are at least 300,000 Hispanics who speak the language some of the time at home. To those who speak only Spanish, stations like La Onda are essential, and the sheriff's critics believe his denying information to such media is part of his anti-immigrant strategy. They believe his office's stance is that people who are in the United States illegally have few rights, so why should they have the right to know about public safety issues?

A reporter for the Spanish-language newspaper La Voz, a free Phoenix-area weekly with a circulation of about 50,000, speculated that shutting out La Onda is meant to confuse and confound those here illegally, who otherwise might pick up on when, how often and in what areas the Sheriff's Office tends to conduct raids.

"Delaying the information can create widespread fear in the community," says the reporter.

La Voz wasn't notified of Arpaio's creation of the hotline for reporting suspected immigration violations, he says.

In fact, the Sheriff's Office leaves La Voz off its tip list frequently, the reporter says. Sure, La Voz finds out about the likes of Arpaio's "Inmate Idle" show, but gets far less of what favored English-language media get about enforcements against illegal aliens.

"When they [MCSO officials] get angry, sometimes they just don't send things," the reporter says.

Indeed, just as with English-language media, it seems that the Sheriff's Office's information blackouts have more to do with reporters offending the sheriff than with his anti-migrant policy.

Prensa Hispana publisher Manny Garcia, whose paper has a weekly circulation of 65,000, was receiving MCSO press releases until earlier this month. Garcia says he wrote a column in November criticizing the MCSO for arresting illegal immigrants during traffic stops, and the information stopped.