Audio By Carbonatix
Straight from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio: calling a press conference about a jail shakedown — when Hard to Kill star Steven Seagal just happens to be in town filming his new cop-u-drama Steven Seagal: Lawman at Joe’s infamous Tent City — was not a publicity stunt.
Only it was.
While we were shocked not to see Arpaio and Seagal together for a man-tastic embrace in front of the local media (Mason Storm was busy patting down work-release inmates returning to the jail at a different part of the compound) the A&E camera crews filming the event were lovin’ them some Joe.
During the shakedown, during which New Times was granted access
inside the jail as detention officers searched inmates and their bunks,
Arpaio, it seems, was on the other side of the fence hammin’ it up with
Seagal’s camera crew.
As we were exiting the facility, Arpaio and several men wearing shirts
with the words “Film Crew” written on the back were standing in front of
a table covered in contraband (things like cigarettes, a
cell phone, chewing tobacco — a regular gulag goody-bag) that the
sheriff claims
were confiscated by MCSO detention officers over the last three days.
The A&E cameras, of course, were rolling.
The large amount of contraband found in such a short period of time, the
sheriff claims, was the reason for the press conference. Although, if
the star of Under Siege weren’t in town, we find it hard to
believe that the sheriff would hold a press conference to announce how
much shit was smuggled into the jail under his watch. “Hey guys,
come see how bad we screwed up” just doesn’t seem like a premise for
which the sheriff would hold a news conference.
As we were leaving, a woman dropped off an inmate, which was a pretty
stupid move considering she had an outstanding warrant for fraud.
The woman was taken into custody by MCSO deputies — with Joe and the
camera crew filming about 20 yards away. Arpaio, you might imagine, had
his back to the woman as she was being arrested. In other words, the
arrest of a woman dumb enough to drop by a jail when she had warrants
for her arrest was the perfect backdrop for America’s self-proclaimed
“toughest sheriff” — and the camera crew for a big-time cable network.
When directly asked why he would hold a press conference about a jail
shakedown while Seagal was in town, Arpaio claims “I think you all know I
do things all the time. I don’t stage. But what’s the difference with
that and Cops?…They’re going around filming police knocking doors
down. I don’t see any problem with that.”
Arpaio, in fact, does hold
publicity stunts
media
events quite frequently. But we couldn’t find one instance where he’s
held a press conference about a shakedown at one of his jails.
Seagal’s absence from Joe’s right hand was suspicious — but we have a theory.
Arpaio, from the second we arrived, made it very clear that he was pretty pissed off at New Times (more so than usual, we’d say) over a blog post published on our Feathered Bastard blog this afternoon.
The announcement of the shakedown was made to the media earlier in the
day, but the MCSO asked that members of the fourth estate not make it
public until 5 p.m. — when the shakedown was scheduled to take place.
Nope — we published the information,
as well as accusations of Arpaio’s media-slutiness for holding a
press conference as he staged a jail shakedown for a big-name movie
star, at about 1 p.m.
Arpaio flack Sergeant Brian Lee says the early announcement could have
compromised the safety of jail employees. However, as the author of that
blog post points out, “you can protect the safety of employees by NOT
calling a news conference.”
In any event, the early suspicion that the jail shakedown was all for
the cameras may have spooked Arpaio into keeping his distance from
Seagal when the sheriff addressed the media in an attempt to avoid looking like a media whore. That’s our theory, anyway.
As for the results of the shakedown: we were only there for about 40
minutes of a shakedown that was billed to last several hours. During our
time in the tents, detention officers confiscated precisely zero
contraband.
