PHOENIX (CN) — A federal judge considered on Friday harsh sanctions against the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona if it doesn’t soon resolve a backlog of misconduct complaints stemming from the days of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
A failure to complete investigations for more than 1,400 complaints has kept alive a class action filed nearly two decades ago over racist policies of “immigration sweeps” in which Latinos were disproportionately detained on suspicions of non-citizenship.
While the policies were deemed unconstitutional in 2011, Arpaio — who billed himself as “America’s toughest sheriff” — was found in criminal contempt in 2017 for continuing to order his deputies to enforce them.
Seven years and two sheriffs later, the parties are still seeking a solution to catch up on the aging investigations. The American Civil Liberties Union, representing the plaintiff class, and the sheriff’s office, joined by the U.S. Department of Justice, offered two potential fixes earlier this month, but U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow has other ideas.
“After reading the report, I believe the answer is something provided by none of the parties,” he said in a federal courthouse in Phoenix Friday afternoon.
Rather than mandating the hiring of 10 additional investigators and doubling average monthly investigation closure rate, as requested by both sides, Snow said he will mandate specific numbers by which the defendants must reduce the backlog, with the number increasing on a monthly basis until the number of cases reaches zero. That way, Snow said, the decision to hire new investigators can be made by necessity rather than a court order.
“I’m not inclined to order 10 new staff when what is actually needed might be 40 more staff,” he said.
When asked if the parties can review a draft of his proposed order, Snow thrust a stapled-stack of papers forward before scurrying into the back room to print out more copies for the rest of the attorneys.
“I’ve always wanted to be a secretary,” the George W. Bush appointee joked between trips to the printer.
The parties have one week to review the draft and suggest changes before Snow finalizes the order.
Both sides agree that the backlog can be reasonably eliminated by March 31, 2026. To do that, sheriff’s office attorney Mary O’Grady said the office will have to remove an average of 63 cases per month from the backlog, all while ensuring that new cases don’t get added to it.
“It’s not a linear path to get to our goal,” she told Snow. She said it may take a few months or a year to get the monthly average up to 63, depending on how soon and how many investigators they can hire.
Snow suggested that he require a smaller number of cases be removed from the backlog starting in September. He offered 35 as an example. He said that number will be ramped up each month until a monthly average of 63 completed cases is achieved.
To ensure compliance, at the end of each yearly quarter, for each month in which the defendants don’t reach their goal, they’ll be required to deposit two times the annual salary for an investigator — $191,000 — into a fund that can only be used to hire more investigators. For example, on December 31, if the sheriff’s office has reduced the backlog by the required amount in October, but failed to do so in both November and December, it will have to put four times the annual investigator salary into the fund.
“You’re going to have to reduce the backlog by a specific number, or you’ll have the money to hire additional staffing,” Snow said.
U.S. Attorney Suraj Kumar said that he doesn’t think sanctions are necessary to achieve a goal the office is already working hard at.
“You can call them sanctions if you want,” Snow replied. “I’ll just call it money that’s clearly required to complete the backlog, based on your failure to resolve it in a way that’s reasonable.”
In a previous order, Snow mandated that investigations are completed within an 85-day window. But defendants asked that the window be expanded back to the state-mandated 180 days, which would mean fewer cases are backlogged, as they’d have more time to be investigated.
ACLU attorney Sebrina Shaw said expanding the investigatory window would only “move a goalpost in order to have a cosmetic change,” and not actually increase the rate at which investigations are completed, which is ultimately what the plaintiff class wants.
Snow, persuaded by O’Grady’s suggestion that expanding the window would reduce the backlog by 23 cases per month, said he is inclined to grant the defendants’ request.
Shaw said she expects Snow to rule sometime soon after Aug. 5. She declined to share a copy of Snow’s draft order.
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