Maricopa County Sheriff Jerry Sheridan recently joined The Show to talk about cooperating with immigration authorities, chronic understaffing and his history as former Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s chief deputy.
The department is still under the eye of a court-appointed monitor, who is charged with getting the department into compliance with a series of court orders aimed at making sure it doesn’t discriminate against Latinos, as it was found guilty of doing more than a decade ago in the landmark case filed by the ACLU, Melendres vs. Arpaio.
Sheridan told The Show he didn’t agree with everything Arpaio did and hopes to get the department out from under this expensive court order.
But, Raul Piña, a longtime member of the Community Advisory Board charged with overseeing MCSO’s compliance with the court order, says the leadership at MCSO has never fully acknowledged the harm it did to Latinos in Maricopa County or committed to truly overhauling its approach. The board is independent and created by the court. Piña told The Show that their goal is to facilitate communication between the monitor, MCSO and the federal court.
Piña joined The Show to talk about the progress he’s seen — and if he thinks Sheridan can get them over the finish line.
We also reached out to the sheriff’s office about a community meeting in Guadalupe that Piña said Sheridan attempted to postpone at the last minute when he first took office. A spokesperson told The Show Sheridan made that request because the meeting fell on a “National Day of Protest” when protesters called for action at the meeting.
It followed a night of protests in Glendale in which a police cruiser’s window was smashed in.
“With all these signs leading up to the meeting,” the sheriff’s office said, “we wanted to keep everyone safe.”
We also reached out to former Sheriff Paul Penzone for comment. We have not received a response.
Full conversation
RAUL PIÑA: So I got involved in the Melendres case when I was an elementary school principal in Maryvale, and I started to hear stories of, from children, saying “my mom was deported, my uncle was deported or detained.” And I saw the, the pain in their face and the tears in their eyes, and I went to a community meeting at one of our schools.
And I was immediately interested in trying to do something. I wasn't sure what I was gonna do, but I volunteered through the ACLU to try to be, to serve on the CAB if you will.
LAUREN GILGER: OK, you've been on the board for eight years, a long time, and what kind of progress have you seen within the department in terms of trying to comply with this order, trying to make sure that they are not racially profiling Latino community members in any way?
PIÑA: I think we're still in a place where we don't have the will of the organization and the commitment to bring about this reform. It's different, a tune up and a, and an engine overhaul are very different things, and I think it's easier to commit to improving the system, tweaking the system, making changes.
But I don't think there's been that acknowledgement that we cause tremendous amount of pain in the community. We don't ever want to go back to that place and let's uproot whatever is left. I don't think we're there yet.
GILGER: So what are the requirements that you're looking at more specifically, because they do get incredibly granular and detailed in terms of the measurements that MCSO officers are trying to meet to prove to the court that this is met. What are they?
PIÑA: The way I see it, leadership is technical, leadership is symbolic. So there's some technical pieces that have to happen in the reform process. There's measurements and there's criteria that the judge will tell us, ultimately this is good enough, this has been sustained over three years. So that's important.
The symbolic side of of leadership, one example, when you have the new sheriff file a petition to the court at 4:30 in the afternoon to try to prevent a 6 o'clock community meeting in Guadalupe. There's symbolism there. There is something that is perhaps intangible, but it's huge. People are going to feel very uncomfortable when the new sheriff does that. So those are the things that are symbolic of where you are as an agency, where your, where your leadership stands.
GILGER: So there's the symbolic measure there that probably feeds a lot into community trust.
PIÑA: Absolutely. People listen to the message within the message. For example, when the sheriff says we haven't had racial profiling in 10 years when we have. I mean, the MCSO commission studies are telling us racial profiling exists, there's racial bias during traffic stops. That is there. The evidence is there, but for a sheriff to say racial profiling has not happened in 10 years, it does not exist, it's, it's concerning.
GILGER: So you're talking about something that the new sheriff, Jerry Sheridan, has said. But he also said, and he told me on The Show not too long ago, that he disagreed with a lot of what Joe Arpaio was doing at the time, that he didn't think that they should be targeting Hispanic neighborhoods to do saturation patrols.
PIÑA: I think that's a nice sentiment to express, but it takes layers of leadership in order to sustain malpractice. So you have to, if you're gonna create some distance between you and that pain that was caused to the community, I think you have to take a stronger stance against that.
If you're going to say I was not a part of that, you have to make a stronger statement: I was not a part of that, and here's why I was not a part of that, and here's the evidence of how I did not participate in that, and here's my commitment to the future. It's not enough to say I disagreed because you were a part of that system that enabled this malpractice to happen over decades.
GILGER: So, so the rebuilding trust process is difficult, especially with somebody, I'm imagining like Jerry Sheridan, who's coming in who was Sheriff Joe Arpaio's chief deputy for so long. Do you think, are you optimistic that he can come in and get this court order under compliance, get this settled and and kind of get the department out from under this cloud as the former sheriff called it?
PIÑA: I think we can be cautiously hopeful or cautiously optimistic about this. Everyone deserves an opportunity. I think he will have his. I would encourage the new sheriff to spike the football in the end zone. He is closer than they've ever been to come into compliance and to sustain compliance, which is another key aspect of this order, but I would hope that he spikes the football and, and lets the previous sheriffs know that he did it, he brought us into compliance. He eliminated racial profiling. That would be great, and I would be the first one to give him kudos for that.
GILGER: Let me ask you about what this looks like in the community there. You mentioned being a school principal in Maryvale for a long time and the kind of experiences you heard from kids there.
Is it still true today that you think people within the Latino community in Maricopa County are hesitant to call MCSO or are suspicious of it, especially given kind of the current environment we're now under where we're seeing mass deportations being carried out again?
PIÑA: I, I do believe that is the case. The fact is that there are folks who are in mixed status families might be going through the process of securing their DACA documentation and so forth, so they are more vulnerable than I am.
I'm a Hispanic vehicle operator, but I also have veteran plates. I live in a suburb. I have an incredible amount of privilege in my role as an educator. So my traffic stop will look differently perhaps, unless I'm traveling with someone in a, in a mixed status situation.
So I think we have to, be sensitive to the most impacted people. It's not enough to say I met with the consulate, I met with CEOs from the charitable organizations. I've done this hand shaking and kissing babies. It's not enough to do those things. We have to listen to the most impacted people and how do they feel. My experience has been in listening to some of those, conversations and meetings, the fear is very much there.
GILGER: What kind of impact did the former sheriff, Sheriff Paul Pennzo have in terms of the progress of this court case from your perspective at least? Like, he left office sort of saying, you know, I'm spending more time investigating my own sheriffs than we are investigating crime in the community, that kind of thing.
PIÑA: It's unfortunate that he abandoned his post and left without seeing this to the end. He had some time left to continue progress towards reform, and he didn't do it. That's his choice. You'll have to live with that.
What they did in the time that Penzone was there, they started moving towards compliance, kudos to them. Some of that was low-hanging fruit, some of that was what we call paper compliance. They started developing training manuals. They started developing data collection systems and so forth.
The challenges are in the interactions at the traffic stop, right? That's where the racially, racial profiling was still being reported, so those things still lingered throughout Penzone's time as a leader there. Unfortunately he left.
And, kudos to Sheriff [Russ] Skinner while he was there. He was also, not only was he the interim, but he was also very much involved in the progress under Penzone that happened. He was in the trenches. He was helping move the process forward.
So I think key people have brought us closer to compliance, and I, I think we're closer than ever. I mean, we have the opportunity to see it through.
