We finally got a chance to inspect the report from the raid on Mesa city buildings last year by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, months after we requested it. You remember this one — the nighttime raid on the city government that employed Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s law enforcement nemesis, George Gascon,…
As our readers know, we corrected misinformation yesterday about whether the takeover of a computer system by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office gave Arpaio and his minions access to judge’s e-mails they aren’t allowed to have. But someone forgot to send the memo to the Arizona Republic’s editorial writers, who…
The chief deputy for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office told a judge yesterday he believed intrusion into a law enforcement computer system “was imminent,” the Arizona Republic reported this morning. Apparently, that’s the reason the chief deputy, Dave Hendershott, ordered a dozen armed deputies to take over the system on…
Two-and-a-half hours of this hearing and we’re wondering how much money taxpayers are paying for this. Remember, we’re all paying for the lawyers on both sides. On the sheriff’s side, it seems like even if this password-changing action was legitimate, it didn’t need to be done as some kind of…
2:40 p.m. Back to hearing. Sheriff’s office is turning over info to the Department of Justice that it believes shows court personnel engaged in criminal activity, says the sheriff’s lawyer, Kerry Martin. Martin does not go into detail but apparently it might have had something to do with the ICJIS…
The head of the Maricopa County ICJIS department, the one the sheriff’s office raided yesterday, just told us that databases cannot be accessed through those computers. In other words, our earlier post was mislabeled — we’ll go back and fix it in a minute. The main thing to know…
Issue: The county is seeking a restraining order against the sheriff’s office following yesterday’s raid by deputies on a building containing county computers The courtroom is packed with private lawyers, county officials, reporters and other observers. Barnett Lotstein, a top aide under Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, came to…
The state legislature inflicts “direct injury” to the governor’s constitutional authority if it withholds passed bills from the governor, the Arizona Supreme Court says in an explanatory opinion released today. If you’ll recall, Governor Jan Brewer had to sue the legislature in June to force it to give her the budget it had passed. Brewer wanted to veto…
The county feud took what is perhaps its ugliest turn yesterday as deputies with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office seized county computers with data a court already ruled the sheriff couldn’t access. UPDATE: We just found out (2:35 p.m.) that the computers seized by the sheriff’s office don’t provide access…
Newspaper articles that contain the word “may” in the nutgraph, the “what’s this article about” paragraph, should often be considered suspect from the start. It’s a J-school basic, and it makes sense. After all, the casual reader can easily turn that into an equally accurate “may not” phrase, which renders…
Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon says he can’t support the legislature’s current budget proposal, despite Governor Jan Brewer’s urging to do so. In a news release sent out this evening by the city (see text below), Gordon says changes to property tax collection rates will lower the amount of bond money…
Do the “tough-on-crime” policies of Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas work to reduce crime? Thomas thinks so. The prim politician, now in his second term, campaigned in 2004 on a platform of stopping illegal immigration and throwing the book at criminals. Now, if you believe him, those policies have…
Arpaio Twitter Watch: What Arpaio is referring to here is the fact that his anti-illegal-immigrant forces have arrested 93 Mexicans and other Latinos in the past two weeks. Okay, we confess we don’t know for sure that they were all Mexicans and Latinos, but how…
Time to toot our own bugle: The Phoenix New Times has been selected as one of the “10 That Do It Right” for 2009 by Editor & Publisher magazine. Our competition in the field: Every other newspaper in the country, apparently. The magazine says this isn’t a “best-of” award,…
To Live and Die in L.A. Phoenix. Thankfully, this big-money bust didn’t involve a nail-biting, wrong-way drive on the freeway that made for such a great action scene in the above-linked movie. Nope, just some good detective work by local cops who followed up on a tip a couple of…
As we’ve mentioned before, if the SCA spokesman, Captain Joel Fox, wants to talk, we’re willing to listen. After we told you about the interesting stuff written on the SCA donation checks, like “Vote for Sheriff Joe Arpaio,” Fox left a message on our blog. His response: “Sorry to spoil…
The first thing we thought upon reading the August 11 letter from Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas to the Department of Justice about his enemies, the Board of Supervisors, was this: Thomas actually cares about this issue? Sure, we get the infantile messing-with-the-county part. That’s been going on between these foes for months. But…
A report by Maricopa County budgeters critical of the use of overtime at the Sheriff’s Office says nepotism and favoritism appears to play a role in who gets extra cash for extra work. News of the report made a splash on the front page of Sunday’s Arizona Republic and seems to have…
A Guadalupe man claims a deputy who pulled him over for a burned-out brake light ran over him, then assaulted his family as he lay trapped and screaming beneath a squad car. These hair-raising details are found in a notice of claim filed last week against Maricopa County, Sheriff Joe Arpaio and…
It’s always nice to see your name in a headline that doesn’t also include the phrase, “police say,” but we’re taking the most recent Sonoran Alliance blog post by “Cincinnatus” with a grain of salt. Cinnypoo has been writing a lot of negative things lately about Tom Horne, the state schools chief…
Alaska’s pulling nearly 800 inmates from a private prison in Eloy, saying it will save millions by switching away from the Correctional Corporation of America. The decision to pick Texas’ Cornell Companies over CCA still leaves a few hundred prisoners in the Red Rock Correctional Center, according to media reports…
It’s a miracle! Or not. According to one scientist, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe that supposedly appeared on a peasant’s cloak more than 200 years ago defies rational explanation. This load of hokum was foisted on a crowd of believers at the First International Marian Congress held over…
