Since 2008, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has ordered thirteen raids (aka crime suppression operations) of heavily Latino Phoenix-area neighborhoods and workplaces in search of ”illegals.”
But if he and his advisors gambled that rounding up hotel maids and landscapers would gain him more voter approval, they gambled wrong.
In part due to his “hard-nosed and sometimes perceived heavy handed tactics against illegal aliens” as well as an ongoing federal grand jury inquiry over alleged abuses of power, Sheriff Joe’s support is tanking in the Phoenix metro area, according to a recent poll of Maricopa County voters.
The details: Well-respected local pollster Earl de Berge, who has taken the pulse of Phoenix for many years, found that only 39 percent of registered voters now approve of Sheriff Joe. That’s down from an astonishing 64 percent approval rating in 2007. According to the poll, Sheriff Joe’s still got most of the county’s GOP voters in his camp, but he’s lost the support of those free-thinking Independents. And in a state where one-third of the voters are Republicans, one-third of the voters are Democrats (they never cottoned to Joe) and one-third of the voters are Independents, Joe might well lose his next election.
Which might explain why Sheriff Joe sent out a fund-raising letter to voters who live outside of Maricopa County. A friend of mine who lives in heavily conservative Yavapai County forwarded me a copy of Sheriff Joe’s fundraising letter. It references a January 16 human rights march in Phoenix that I happened to cover for my book, which comes out in August and is called ILLEGAL: Life and Death in the Undocumented Underground.
Before I get into the letter, here’s a picture of the march by photographer Kathy McCraine. (I’m the female journalist in jeans covering the march.) Do you see nasty signs? Do you see masked marchers? Do you see hooligans?
Photo by Kathy McCraine
See, the reason I ask all these questions is because Sheriff Joe, in a fundraising letter that he sent to those conservative prospective donors in Yavapai County, writes this about the march documented in the picture above:
“On January 16, 2010, more than 10,000 protestors marched on my jails to oppose my enforcement of state and federal immigration laws.
Protestors brawled with and assaulted police. Demonstrators dressed in all black and wearing hoods to conceal their identity threw bottles filled with rocks and attacked officers including a mounted officer and her horse. The mob then surrounded her and hit the horse with sticks.
The masked protestors screamed profanities and called for my assassination carrying signs that read “Assassinate Arpaio” and other violent messages some so profane, I won’t bother repeating them here.”
Sheriff Joe says in the letter to send money fast, so he can continue to enforce the law even in the face of mounting attacks from the Leftist media, the Leftist presidency, the Leftist U.S. Attorney’s Office, and now, from this most recent demonstration he infers a mob of 10,000 masked izquierdistas threw bottles and beat horses with sticks.
Here’s the truth: Of 10,000 marchers, 9,997 were peaceful.
That’s according to public documents.
Only three marchers were singled out by county prosecutors for causing trouble at the January 16 march. That’s right. Three people. The first, nineteen-year-old Jeremiah Matthew Henry, allegedly used a wooden stick to whack a mounted Phoenix police officer who was “working crowd control.” Twenty-seven-year-old Issa Emadi is accused of throwing one water bottle at the cops. And twenty-four-year-old Sarah Grace Daniels is accused of striking a cop with the handle of a banner she had been carrying in the march.
I’m not saying Henry, Emadi and Daniels were in the right if they did what they are accused of doing. They face serious criminal charges for their actions, and if they’re guilty, they’ll pay.
But isn’t it also a sin to scare donors into sending you money by painting an entire group of peaceful marchers (mostly Latino families) as radicals?
I have covered several of these marches against the Sheriff’s alleged violations of human rights, and I can tell you I have never seen any violence. I didn’t see violence on January 16.
However, a mom, dad and their two children saw part of the melee that allegedly involved Henry, Daniels and Emadi. The parents told me they saw a female mounted cop ride into the crowd and squirt people with pepper spray. Of course, the cop was probably trying to subdue the three protestors.
Unfortunately, the Phoenix mountie also sprayed this immigrant couple’s five-year-old son.
The child was treated at a hospital emergency room for breathing difficulties.
I took this picture of him a week later. I slanted my iPhone camera in order to take advantage of the natural light. 
- Photo by Terry Greene Sterling
You can see the child is physically okay now, and he doesn’t like to talk about the pepper spray. Scroll back up and take a look at his eyes. You’ve got to wonder what goes on inside his five-year-old heart whenever he sees a uniformed cop or a horse.
Ask yourself: Who is the true victim?
The boy?
Or the sheriff?
Take heart! If not fired by the voters first, the sheriff’s mortality will remove him from office, eventually.
nice work……
I think with our economy we need to hire americans 1st and the illegals will go away , but when they do wrong they should be arrested and then taken home.
Demagogy (also demagoguery) (Ancient Greek δημαγωγία, from δῆμος dēmos “people” and ἄγειν agein “to lead”) is a strategy for gaining political power by appealing to the prejudices, emotions, fears and expectations of the public—typically via impassioned rhetoric and propaganda, and often using nationalist, populist or religious themes.
in response to rob shaw, the problem is not just black and white, there is no right or wrong. this has become a very complex issue, and there is not going to be easy answers
Illegal aliens are not law abiding. For illegal’s to shape the political scene is nothing short of a coup. The economics of subsidizing the shortcomings of the Mexican government is not sustainable. If illegal’s want to voice the desires for a better life, do so to the Mexican government that has created your state of inequity. Throw off that oppression. Our immigration laws need to be upheld. I commend Joe Arpaio for his commitment to the oath he took.