Joseph Michael Arpaio is an American former law enforcement officer and politician.
73 Facts About Joe Arpaio
2.
Joe Arpaio served as the 36th Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona for 24 years, from 1993 to 2017, losing reelection to Democrat Paul Penzone in 2016.
3.
Joe Arpaio is known for investigating former US President Barack Obama's birth certificate, and, as of 2018, he continued to claim without evidence that it was forged.
4.
The US Department of Justice concluded that Joe Arpaio oversaw the worst pattern of racial profiling in US history, and subsequently filed suit against him for unlawful discriminatory police conduct.
5.
Joe Arpaio was an unsuccessful candidate in Arizona's Republican primary election for US Senate in 2018.
6.
In 2020, Joe Arpaio failed in his attempt to become the Maricopa County Sheriff again.
7.
Joe Arpaio was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on June 14,1932, to Italian parents, both from Lacedonia, Italy.
8.
Joe Arpaio's mother died while giving birth to him, and he was raised by his father, who ran an Italian grocery store.
9.
Joe Arpaio completed high school and worked in his father's business until age 18 when he enlisted in the United States Army.
10.
Joe Arpaio served in the Army from 1950 to 1954 in the Medical Department and was stationed in France for part of the time as a military policeman.
11.
Joe Arpaio served as a police officer in Las Vegas for six months before being appointed as a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which later became part of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
12.
Joe Arpaio was re-elected in 1996,2000,2004,2008 and 2012.
13.
Joe Arpaio was featured and profiled by news media worldwide and claimed to average 200 television appearances per month.
14.
In late 2008 and early 2009, Joe Arpaio appeared in Smile.
15.
Joe Arpaio banned inmates from possessing "sexually explicit material" including Playboy magazine, after female officers complained that inmates openly masturbated while viewing the articles.
16.
In February 2007, Arpaio instituted an in-house radio station he called KJOE, broadcasting classical music, opera, Frank Sinatra hits, patriotic music, and educational programming five days a week, four hours each day.
17.
Joe Arpaio instituted the world's first all-juvenile volunteer chain gang; volunteers earned high school credit toward a diploma.
18.
Joe Arpaio claimed this saved the county $70,000 in the first year the rule was in effect.
19.
Joe Arpaio introduced pink handcuffs, using the event to promote his book, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, America's Toughest Sheriff.
20.
In 2004, Joe Arpaio ordered all undocumented immigrants then in jail to register for the Selective Service System.
21.
In November 2010, Joe Arpaio created an armed illegal immigration operations posse to help his deputies enforce immigration law.
22.
Joe Arpaio's practices were criticized by government agencies such as the United States Department of Justice and United States district courts, as well as organizations such as Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Arizona Ecumenical Council, the American Jewish Committee, and the Arizona chapter of the Anti-Defamation League.
23.
Controversies surrounding Joe Arpaio included allegations of racial profiling, for which the ACLU sued the sheriff's office.
24.
Joe Arpaio told her teacher the next day, and her teacher called the MCSO.
25.
Joe Arpaio became pregnant by him, and had an abortion.
26.
In February 2010, Pima County Superior Court Judge John S Leonardo found that Arpaio "misused the power of his office to target members of the Board of Supervisors for criminal investigation".
27.
In July 2010, a committee established by Arpaio funded advertisements critical of Rick Romley, a candidate in the Republican primary for Maricopa County Attorney, and Arizona Attorney General candidate Tom Horne, despite the fact that Arpaio was not running for re-election at the time.
28.
Montgomery ultimately defeated Romley in the primary election, with Romley stating Joe Arpaio's ads "hurt" his results.
29.
An analysis by the Maricopa County Office of Management and Budget, completed in April 2011, found that Joe Arpaio had misspent almost $100 million over the previous 5 years.
30.
Joe Arpaio's office kept a separate set of personnel books detailing actual work assignments, different from information kept in the county's official human resources records.
31.
Joe Arpaio used the detention fund to pay for investigations of political rivals, as well as activities involving his human-smuggling unit.
32.
Separate investigations by The Arizona Republic uncovered widespread abuse of public funds and county policies by Joe Arpaio's office, including high-ranking employees routinely charging expensive meals and stays at luxury hotels on their county credit cards.
33.
The Republic found that a restricted jail-enhancement fund was improperly used to pay for out-of-state training, a staff party at a local amusement park, and a $456,000 bus which Joe Arpaio purchased in violation of county procurement rules.
34.
Former top MCSO staffers claimed that Joe Arpaio knew of the acts alleged in the Munnell memo, but took no action to stop them.
35.
Joe Arpaio was investigated for politically motivated and "bogus" prosecutions, which a former US Attorney called "utterly unacceptable".
36.
Dowling later filed suit, alleging negligence, malicious prosecution, abuse of process and several constitutional violations, although Joe Arpaio won summary judgment against her claims.
37.
Joe Arpaio ran many operations targeting businesses employing Latinos, and arresting employees who were unauthorized immigrants for identity theft.
38.
Until 2011, when a Federal District Court injunction halted the practice, Joe Arpaio maintained an immigrant smuggling squad which illegally stopped cars with Latino drivers or passengers to check their immigration status.
39.
Joe Arpaio repeatedly denied racial profiling, although the MCSO did not have a policy specifically barring the practice nor any reliable internal method of ensuring it was not taking place.
40.
Joe Arpaio insisted that his deputies didn't profile based on ethnicity or race.
41.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio has made public statements that a fact finder could interpret as endorsing racial profiling, such as stating that, even lacking 287 authority, his officers can detain people based upon 'their speech, what they look like, if they look like they came from another country'.
42.
Joe Arpaio filed an appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
43.
Joe Arpaio filed a limited appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, contesting the district court's order, insofar as it covered traffic stops outside of saturation patrols.
44.
On June 4,2014, the Phoenix New Times reported that Joe Arpaio had initiated a criminal investigation of Judge Snow as well as the DOJ.
45.
The article quoted unnamed sources, including a former detective with the MCSO's Special Investigations Division, who claimed that the investigation was being run directly by Joe Arpaio and was based on his belief that Judge Snow and the DOJ had engaged in a conspiracy against him.
46.
Joe Arpaio neither confirmed nor denied the investigation to the Phoenix New Times.
47.
However, in an April 2015 civil contempt hearing before Judge Snow, Arpaio testified that his attorney, Tim Casey, had hired a private investigator to investigate Judge Snow's wife, and that the MCSO had paid Dennis L Montgomery to investigate whether the DOJ had been penetrating Arpaio's e-mails as well as those of local attorneys and judges, including Judge Snow.
48.
Joe Arpaio said his jails were meant as places for punishment, and that the inhabitants were all criminals, although in fact most inmates had not been convicted of a crime and were awaiting trial.
49.
On July 7,2009, Joe Arpaio held a press conference and announced that he would not cooperate with the investigation, either by providing documents or permitting interviews with personnel.
50.
On September 2,2010, the Department of Justice filed suit against Joe Arpaio to compel his cooperation with the investigation.
51.
The suit was settled in June 2011, after Joe Arpaio allowed federal officials to interview Sheriff's office employees and review hundreds of thousands of documents for the investigation.
52.
The Justice Department accused Joe Arpaio of engaging in "unconstitutional policing" by unfairly targeting Latinos for detention and arrest, and retaliating against critics.
53.
The United States' claims in this suit encompassed, but were broader than, the unconstitutional discriminatory conduct that the Court in Melendres v Arpaio found the MCSO to have engaged in concerning its immigration enforcement-related traffic stops.
54.
Joe Arpaio rejected the notion of a court-appointed monitor, and denied that the MCSO engaged in racial profiling.
55.
At two press conferences held in March 2012, Joe Arpaio and members of his Cold Case Posse claimed that President Barack Obama's long-form birth certificate, released by the White House on April 27,2011, is a computer-generated forgery.
56.
Some major claims presented by Joe Arpaio were subsequently shown to be false; specifically, the 1961 Vital Statistics Instruction Manual that Joe Arpaio and his team claimed to possess contradicted what they claimed it said, and images shown by them, purportedly from that manual, were instead from computer specifications dated 1968 and 1969.
57.
In 2007, Joe Arpaio said that it was an "honor" for his department to be compared to the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist terrorist organization.
58.
In December 2014, after many warnings, US District Judge G Murray Snow told Arpaio there was a very real possibility that he would refer Arpaio to the US Attorney's Office for criminal prosecution on contempt of court charges due to the MCSO's failure to comply with the court's order to stop its racial profiling practices.
59.
In March 2015, a month before the scheduled contempt hearing, Joe Arpaio admitted that he violated several court orders, and consented to a finding of civil contempt against him.
60.
The charges were filed just two weeks before an election in which Joe Arpaio was running for re-election.
61.
On July 31,2017, Joe Arpaio was found guilty of criminal contempt of court.
62.
Attorneys for Joe Arpaio have stated that they are moving for his case to be dismissed in light of the pardon.
63.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey was among the politicians praising the pardon, crediting Joe Arpaio with helping to reduce crime over a long career, and Ducey welcomed the finality that the pardon gave to the whole matter.
64.
The pardon was strongly criticized by Arizona Senator John McCain as Joe Arpaio had expressed no remorse for his actions.
65.
In 2018, Joe Arpaio sued The New York Times, the HuffPost, Rolling Stone, and CNN, alleging that their analyses of Joe Arpaio's proceedings had defamed him.
66.
In November 2007, a group calling itself Arizonans for the US Constitution and Recall of Joe Arpaio filed the paperwork to begin an effort to recall Arpaio and County Prosecutor Thomas from office for allegedly disobeying and violating the United States Constitution and abuse of power.
67.
On May 30,2013, a recall attempt on Joe Arpaio again failed only a week after a federal judge ruled that the sheriff's office had engaged in systematic discrimination against Latinos in violation of their constitutional rights.
68.
Joe Arpaio stated in a September 2017 interview with American Free Press that he would consider running for office again, including the United States Congress, if President Donald Trump asked him to.
69.
In January 2018, Joe Arpaio announced his intention to seek the Republican nomination for the US Senate in 2018.
70.
Joe Arpaio faced Martha McSally and Kelli Ward in the August 28,2018, Republican primary.
71.
Joe Arpaio lost the primary election to his former right-hand man, Jerry Sheridan.
72.
Joe Arpaio announced his candidacy for mayor of Fountain Hills, Arizona, on October 5,2021.
73.
Joe Arpaio married his wife Ava in 1958 and they had two children.