Just as revealed in the United States investigation, Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) staff took part in discrimination against Latinos. The findings from the inquiry depict a picture of an office that has incompetent deputies and detention officers whose aim is to harass Latino drivers on the highways and arrest innocent members of the community under the guise of searching for illegal immigrants. Such form of discrimination is extended to the jails overseen by the department through the mistreatment of non-English speaking Latino convicts (Lukinbeal & Sharp, 2015). The nonexistence of clear strategies and measures of guaranteeing successful and constitutional policing in conjunction with divergences from extensively established policing and correctional policies, and inadequate oversight and liability frameworks, have led to a persistent culture of disrespect for fundamental and constitutional duties.
The United States investigation on the MCSO disclosed that Latino drivers were nine-fold more probable of being stopped when compared to their non-Latino counterparts. The professionals who carried out the inquiry believe that it is one of the most glaring racial profiling accounts ever witnessed in the US (Menjívar, Simmons, Alvord, & Valdez, 2018). Nearly 20% of the traffic-associated incidences established by the human smuggling unit in the department had details showing that the stops could have been undertaken in breach of the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable arrests (Elcioglu, 2017). The investigation also found that the Sheriff’s well-calculated raids that sought to arrest illegal immigrants were at times not prompted by complaints describing involvement in crimes but ones mentioning dark-skinned individuals or Spanish speakers in a region. The application of such kinds of biased pointers as a foundation for the performance of enforcement activities leads to increased stops and arrests with no legal justification.
References
Elcioglu, E. F. (2017). The state effect: Theorizing immigration politics in Arizona. Social Problems, 64(2), 239-255.
Lukinbeal, C., & Sharp, L. (2015). Performing America’s toughest sheriff: Media as practice in Joe Arpaio’s Old West. GeoJournal, 80(6), 881-892.
Menjívar, C., Simmons, W. P., Alvord, D., & Valdez, E. S. (2018). Immigration enforcement, the racialization of legal status, and perceptions of the police: Latinos in Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Phoenix in Comparative Perspective. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, 15(1), 107-128.