Audit: Maricopa County Sheriff overstated compliance costs by $163M

This story was published Oct. 8 and updated Oct. 9 to include a statement from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.

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For months, prominent Republicans in Arizona have decried the mounting costs of complying with a federal judge’s orders to reform the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, with county officials pegging the cost of compliance over the last decade to soon pass the $350 million mark. Now, though, an audit of those costs has revealed that the sheriff’s office has been charging tens of millions to compliance efforts that had nothing to do with the underlying racial profiling case, Melendres v. Arpaio.

On Wednesday, federal Judge G. Murray Snow released a 93-page report on the county sheriff’s compliance expenses. According to the report, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office improperly attributed more than $163 million to compliance with court orders in the years-long case — or 72% of the $226 million the county has spent on the case from 2014 to 2024.

Snow ordered his appointed monitor, Robert Warshaw, to investigate how the nearly quarter of a billion dollars had been spent, partially in response to a litany of critical Republican politicians. Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, Board of Supervisors Chair Thomas Galvin and Rep. Andy Biggs are among those who have called for Sheriff Jerry Sheridan and his agency to be freed from Snow’s ordered reforms due to the supposedly overwhelming expense to taxpayers.

At issue is the cost of the county to adhere to a list of reforms Snow ordered in 2013, after he found that the office of then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio had racially profiled Latino drivers, illegally stopping them and detaining them during Arpaio’s law enforcement sweeps of Hispanic communities. Snow’s order in the case, brought by the ACLU, ended Arpaio’s reign of terror and error, but the price tag of compliance has been astounding. And, according to the report, it’s largely the sheriff’s office and the county’s fault.

Warshaw’s budget analysts found that only about 28% of the $226 million at issue was spent correctly on Melendres-related activities. The rest of the money was attributed to Melendres as well, despite little apparent relation to compliance efforts. The monitor suggests that the sheriff’s office may be in violation of state law as a result.

“These costs, individually or in combination, were unrelated to or unnecessary for Melendres compliance, lacked appropriate justification, or resulted in purposeful misrepresentation by MCSO, uninformed approvals by County leadership, or both,” the report reads.

In a statement to New Times, sheriff’s office spokesperson Chris Hegstrom said: “We received the report this afternoon, and our attorneys and experts are reviewing it to determine areas of common ground and any findings we may dispute.”

The ACLU quickly fired off a press release, crowing about the outcome. “Among the expenditures wrongly charged to Ortega Melendres are purchases for golf carts, horses, tasers, jet fuel, office renovations, and car washes,” its statement read.

“MCSO has been quietly diverting taxpayer dollars to unrelated expenses and then using their inflated price tag to claim that it’s ‘too expensive’ to stop violating the Constitution,” Victoria Lopez, executive director for the ACLU of Arizona, said in the statement. “The agency’s misrepresentation of the costs in this case is not an accident. It’s a product of conscious decisions made and sustained within MCSO. This report shows the truth: it’s not reform that’s expensive, it’s MCSO’s misconduct.”

This is a breaking story and will be updated.