Meanwhile, hundreds of rape and child-molestation cases got scant attention from Arpaio's handful of sex-crimes deputies.
At a December news conference, Joe Arpaio listens to questions about botched sex-crimes investigations under his watch.
![Levalya Beyart of El Mirage says that after her daughter reported being raped in 2007, the Sheriff's Office told her, "This [is] not a priority."](http://media.phoenixnewtimes.com/joe-arpaio-s-office-says-to-hell-with-the-children.7636314.40.jpg)
Jamie Peachey
Levalya Beyart of El Mirage says that after her daughter reported being raped in 2007, the Sheriff's Office told her, "This [is] not a priority."
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About two years after the Sheriff's Office took over in El Mirage, the town decided to "take back" the police department.
The idea was to have the MCSO relinquish control by late spring 2008. But hearing that his services no longer were wanted in El Mirage, Arpaio pulled the plug on the cooperative agreement in October 2007.
Following that, during a sex-crimes unit staff meeting, Lieutenant Hank Brandimarte told Sergeant Kim Seagraves that all El Mirage cases would be returned to the town, whether they were finished or not, according to Mary Ward and James Weege's letter.
The sex-crimes detectives were given a "short time frame" in which to summarize what had been done on the outstanding cases and what still needed to be done.
"After the cases were [put together for transfer back], they sat on a conference table at MCSO for about a month, with no one working them," Ward and Weege wrote.
Finally, the boxes of reports were driven to El Mirage.
A few weeks later, Arpaio's executive chief, Scott Freeman, got a call from Mike Frazier, who'd been hired as the new police chief in the West Valley town.
"Hey, what I got was a bunch of crap," Freeman recalled Frazier saying, according to the Babeu report.
As Frazier remembers it, his language was even more colorful. He and his staff were stunned when they reviewed the cases.
"You could look at them and tell no work had been done," he says.
MCSO Captain Steve Whitney, Brandimarte's supervisor, offered to take back the poorly investigated cases, but Frazier declined, preferring to have his own office review them. Frazier and his department soon realized that though some of the cases weren't solid, many others were.
"A lot of people had continued to be victims," Frazier says.
Frazier sent a written complaint to Arpaio.
MCSO officials soon realized they had a major situation on their hands.
At first, Brandimarte was told to check on the problem.
But Seagraves and Ward didn't want Brandimarte investigating the sex-crimes unit because (it later was affirmed) he had sexually harassed them. The women filed a complaint against him, and the inquiry into the sex-crimes unit — and the sex-crimes cases themselves — stalled for months.
Two investigations eventually came about: The first was a "remedial" probe intended to fix outstanding cases and solve problems that resulted in minimal police work. The second was the internal inquiry aimed at assigning blame for the situation.
Neither investigation actually began until mid-May 2008, more than six months after Frazier's complaint.
One consequence was that the sex-crimes unit fell even further behind on its work from the end of the El Mirage contract until late summer 2008.
As Weege and Ward describe it, their captain informed the unit that it would be required to help with an audit of older cases but it still would be responsible for ongoing cases and call-outs on new crimes.
With the unit still minimally staffed, another supervisor said some of the detectives would be tasked with an important new assignment. This was soon after then-Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon had criticized Arpaio's sweeps and accused the Sheriff's Office of racial profiling.
A young political opponent of Gordon's, Jarrett Maupin, told the MCSO that Gordon had been involved in a sexual relationship with a man. The allegation proved to be false, but the MCSO made the investigation a priority.
The unit was informed that its members would get overtime pay to work the case.
"Detectives expressed their concerns that this appeared to be politically motivated and [that] they weren't comfortable being involved in it," Ward and Weege wrote in their letter. "Detectives made comments about the absurdity of the Gordon investigation and the irony that they could get overtime for this, but not for child interviews."
Detective Weege wrote that he refused Lugo's request to run criminal background checks on Gordon's staff for a "maybe" crime — that such activity might constitute illegal use of law enforcement computers. Lugo, according to Weege, said he would find somebody else to do it.
Maupin later pleaded guilty to a charge of false reporting.
In mid-August, because of a "hostile work environment" and stress, Ward and Weege resigned from the MCSO. They had no idea at the time that they were targeted in the internal investigation into the sex-crimes mess.
After they left, they were told by a deputy that supervisors in the office had talked of serving search warrants on their homes. Their offices at the MCSO were "taped off as if they were crime scenes," they later learned.
The Sheriff's Office — rather than admit that the debacle with the sex-abuse cases was caused by Arpaio's politically self-serving decisions on where to expend resources — decided the lowly detectives would be scapegoated.
The "remedial" investigation by the Sheriff's Office resulted in the reopening of 432 cases considered potentially problematic. It's unclear how many of these are El Mirage cases.
"They went back, reopened cases, re-did interviews, re-did search warrants, made arrests, " MCSO Executive Chief Freeman told Babeu's investigators, adding that he transferred five or six detectives into the sex-crimes unit to help.
