There’s a great deal to be said about Donald Trump’s pardon for criminal racist Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, found guilty of criminal contempt for refusing to comply with a court’s order that he stop unconstitutionally profiling Latinx people.
ColorLines (8/28/17)
As ColorLines‘ Catherine Lizette Gonzalez (8/28/17) reminds, Arpaio also reinstated chain gangs, ran an outdoor tent city jail he himself described as a “concentration camp,” denied women detainees menstrual hygiene products, and put people in solitary confinement if they didn’t understand instructions in English. He ran a 24-hour webcast featuring pretrial detainees being arrested, strip-searched and held in cells, until that was ruled illegal by the courts. Twenty-four percent of the deaths in Arpaio’s jails were deemed to be suicides–almost three times New York City’s rate, and four times the rate in Cook County, Illinois. And while he was busy illegally harassing people of color, he failed to investigate more than 400 cases of sexual assault, including on children.
One of the things that should also be noted is how corporate media aided and abetted the man outlets like CNN and NPR introduced with his own preferred sobriquet of “America’s Toughest Sheriff” (Extra!, 6/09). Remember when he had his own show on Fox‘s Reality Channel: Smile…You’re Under Arrest, in which nonviolent offenders were “pranked” into getting arrested for viewers’ amusement? Arpaio was a frequent guest of CNN‘s Lou Dobbs, and had a chummy relationship with Larry King.
But, as reporter Aura Bogado wrote for FAIR (Extra!, 6/09), while Arpaio was a cable TV favorite, the Latinx people his policies targeted were not. Over a year, Bogado found, Arpaio appeared on cable TV at least 21 times, while Latinx people were included in the conversation just twice.
In one illustrative instance, on the CNN show State of the Union (2/15/09), host John King said, “We sat down with Sheriff Arpaio this week while we were here in Arizona, but we also talked to a woman named Rubi, who is in this country illegally and recently lost her job. Let’s listen for just a second.” Rubi got a chance to say she came to this country to work and live with dignity. But not much more, because CNN thought she and everyone she represented deserved “just a second.”
The Arizona Republic (8/25/17) editorialized that Arpaio’s pardon “was a sign of pure contempt for every American who believes in justice, human dignity and the rule of law.” And they aren’t wrong. But media might also use this incident to examine their own role in giving a pass and a platform to a person who gleefully purposefully flouted the law in order to carry out a racist campaign.
Do oathkeepers care? I know the oaf keepers dont.
“Latinx” has to be one of the most obnoxious neologisms in use today. It’s such a silly thing to do, force Yankee language neuroses on Romance languages that never harmed anyone – and it’s bad grammar to boot!
Also, People who aren’t Latino probably don’t pick up on it, but for someone who grew up in a Portuguese speaking household it reads very strangely. Latinsh?
once again FAIR thank you for the reminder of how truly vile this man and the media that normalizes the unthinkable is. You also forgot that he made inmates where pink underwear and that many dies in the Tent cities due to the summer heats though they welcomed it in winter however conditions where so many inmates put toothpaste in their ears to avoid cockroaches coming in. Neo-Dickensian in action.
What a strange man this supposed sheriffs was .He sounds like a feudal lord or some of those weird puritans and their strange manner of punishment. He was only supposed to serve 6 months or something. I suppose that if he ws sent to jail, then enough people would have had enough reasons to whack him.
it’s so tempting to think… maybe he should be Puritanized and set into the stocks, and forced to wear pink underwear, but sitting in an air conditioned mall in Arizona, because the cruel and unusual punishment that he gave out for tent prisons in the heat, did kill people.
Or maybe a fund raiser, where the Arpaio person would be wearing pink diapers and displayed inside of a mall in a chamber with bullet proof glass, the public could buy chances to throw baseballs to make him fall into a tub of water…….to remind him that hisr interpretation of laws is ALL WET! This could be done every Saturday for 6 months and I bet they could rause a lot fo money to humanize prisons and sheriffs. Or, would that be a just as awful cruel and unusual punishment and I have just turned myself into an awful Puritan?
Further along the lines of letting everyone else off the hook in favor of safe Trump-bashing: why did the justice system leave a monster like Arpaio with nothing worse than a misdemeanor contempt conviction (pre-pardon) on the Federal side, with nothing on the state side?
It is meant as no defense of the Tanning Bed Oddity in Chief to point out that all the fulminations against the pardon as an affront to our sacred Constitution conveniently omit the low-level nature of the offense being nullified, and gloss over the systemic issues behind that fact.
Our corporate-capitalist media must always find the newest sensation so they can leave people confused but watching their TV screen while the advertisers sell their beer, shampoo, condoms, and autos. People buy the products that pay for television broadcasting and they are left with such misinformation that they are not likely to fight to change anything.