Department of Justice finds Sheriff Joe Arpaio has bias towards Latinos

At long last Joe Arpaio, America’s self-proclaimed toughest sheriff, will have to face the music — and you can be sure it won’t be Christmas carols.


As nasty a human being as they come, the infamous Maricopa County Sheriff was exposed in a scathing Justice Department report, made public on Thursday, as the racist bully every immigrant — especially Latino — has known him to be for years.


The Justice Department’s expert on measuring racial profiling said it was the most egregious case he has seen, according to Thomas Perez, who heads the department’s civil rights division.


Yet, in a Thursday afternoon press conference, Arpaio, in grandiose terms, played the victim.


“This is a sad day for America,” he said, and went on to blame President Obama for orchestrating a “witch hunt” against him for political reasons. The guy has gall.


It took the feds three years, but the 22-page report details evidence that Arpaio, 79, engaged in a pattern “of unconstitutional policing” that created “a chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations.”


The Department of Homeland Security followed up by giving Arpaio the boot and cancelling the rest of its 287(g) agreement with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.


Arpaio’s abuse of power is almost unbelievable blatant. According to the report, for instance, Latinos are four to nine times more likely to be pulled over in traffic stops in Maricopa County than non-Latinos. It also found that the sheriff’s department treated all Latinos as if they were undocumented.


According to the report, Latino drivers were four to nine times more likely to be stopped than their non-Latino counterparts in and around Phoenix. The report also found mistreatment, of Latino inmates who do not speak English in Maricopa County jails. In addition to findings of mistreatment the Fourth Amendment may have been violated in up to a fifth of traffic-related incidents reported by the department’s human smuggling unit.


Arpaio shrugged off the criticism as politically motivated during a news conference on Thursday. He criticized Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano for revoking his department’s access to a database of identifying undocumented immigrants. He suggested the actions of the federal government would be a welcome sign for illegal immigrants.


“This is a sad day for America as a whole,” Sheriff Arpaio said, “we are proud of the work we have done to fight illegal immigration.”


There is a separate federal grand jury investigation of Sheriff Arpaio’s office that is focused on accusations of abuse of power by the department’s public corruption squad.