Paul Babeu Turns Distortion of Truth Into an Art Form

He offered a similar description to a National Guard publication in 2010. He was quoted as saying he was a "public affairs officer [who] excelled at increasing morale and handling soldiers' issues, including family and psychological issues."

Several months after returning from Iraq, he was deployed to Yuma from June 2006 to November 2007 as part of Operation Jumpstart. Thousands of National Guard troops were ordered to the U.S.-Mexico border to aid Border Patrol agents while the feds embarked on a massive hiring campaign to get more boots on the ground.

Babeu with U.S. Senator John McCain.

Babeu as an altar boy in Massachusetts.

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• Paul Babeu
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Some National Guard troops took over administrative duties to free up Border Patrol agents for fieldwork, and others stood watch as armed guards and alerted agents of border breaches.

Babeu served as commander over Task Force Yuma. Depending on which interview with him you read, Major Babeu commanded 400, 700, or more than 1,000 Guard troops.

Attempting to do damage control after his Mexican ex-lover's accusations, he vastly inflated the number of emergencies he responded to as a Chandler policeman.

During a March appearance on www.newsmax.tv, a conservative, web-based talk show, he described himself as a Chandler cop who "literally respond[ed] to thousands and thousands of emergencies, people needing help, families needing help or protection, to save lives."

Babeu was on the payroll of the Chandler PD for six years — from December 31, 2002 until he resigned on January 4, 2009, to take over as Pinal County sheriff. But he was intermittently deployed as a Guardsman for about two years and took an additional six months of leave to campaign full time for the Sheriff's Office.

This means that he was on patrol in Chandler for about 3 1/2 years. When you crunch the numbers over that time period, he would have had to respond to 2.75 emergencies during every shift to reach even 2,000 such potentially lifesaving calls.

And this is a conservative estimate, since it doesn't take into account other reasons Babeu might have been off the street during a shift: personal time off, training, court appearances.

In addition, during 2003, the busiest year of Babeu's tenure at the Chandler PD, the department received 19,753 emergency calls for service and had about 230 patrol officers on the streets. If all things were equal, that's an average of 86 emergency calls per cop for the year.

Still another inconsistency in Babeu's résumé is his claim that he was awarded two life-saving medals as a city cop — when Chandler police officials say they only have one in their records.

Babeu got the commendation for his response to a July 2004 incident, in which (before paramedics arrived) he performed CPR on a man found collapsed outside a Circle K after drinking and shooting heroin.

Maybe an impressive feat on its own, but not impressive enough for Babeu, who appears to believe that inflating his curriculum vitae will make him more appealing to voters.

Paul Babeu's strategy is that if he can convince voters that he is an unapologetic enforcer of the strictest immigration laws, that he is staunchly anti-abortion, and that he will wage war on the hated-by-conservatives Barack Obama administration, they will forget or forgive what many fellow Republicans see as his tawdry lifestyle.

But on issues such as immigration enforcement and abortion, Babeu's record has swayed left and right.

"I'm against not only amnesty, I'm against the parsing of the law," Babeu said during a media interview at the 2012 CPAC in Washington, as he mocked Obama for "just waving his royal hand, thinking that he can just say we're gonna enforce some of the laws."

Just a year earlier, it was Babeu who was waving his "royal hand," making a round of public appearances as state lawmakers considered the $5 million earmark for the PCSO that Babeu claimed was essential for fighting smugglers' violence in his non-border county.

"I've never gone onto farms [to bust illegal workers].You know how many people would like me to do that? Quite a few," he told a Tucson TV station in February 2011. "You know how many people want me to pursue employers [of undocumented workers]? You know how many people want me to aggressively go into . . . government buildings [in search of illegals who may be working on cleaning crews]? I've never done that."

Babeu also said he was not against "any type of guest-worker program."

Lawmakers ended up approving that $5 million earmark for the PCSO, but the amount was whittled down to $1.7 million by March 2011.

Babeu gladly accepted his earmarked financial package, but he was silent about that special pot of cash during the congressional debate in Prescott. Instead, when the moderator asked the candidates whether they supported any type of earmark, Babeu delivered the responsible Republican answer: "No!"

He also has fallen short of Republican fiscal conservatism in his own PCSO budget.

"At the end of this fiscal year, he will be in a deficit," Pinal County Board of Supervisors Chairman Pete Rios tells New Times. "He will have exceeded his budget. We will have to bail him out to the tune of $600,000, $700,000. When he talks about all his 'accomplishments,' the budget certainly isn't one of them."

Reminded that the sheriff claims his office will have a budget surplus at the end of the fiscal year, Rios scoffs, "There is a lot of spinning that comes out of [Babeu's] office . . . and a lot of the information that comes out has been bent and shaped so it looks favorable."