More than $7,000 in cable TV subscriptions.
An $11,000 golf cart.
$1.5 million in renovations to office space in a swanky Phoenix high-rise.
And another $1.7 million for Tasers.
Those were among more than $200 million in expenses that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office billed to a class-action settlement aimed at rooting out racial profiling in the department.
A federal judge in 2013 found the department under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio had violated the constitutional rights of Latino drivers, and the court has required sweeping reforms. These include documenting all traffic stops to detect patterns of racial bias, employing additional investigators to probe reports of deputy misconduct and appointing a monitor to oversee the settlement.
Since Sheriff Jerry Sheridan took office last year, he and Republicans on the county’s Board of Supervisors have cited the cost of complying with these orders to call for an end to the settlement of the case known as Melendres v. Arpaio — even as reviews of the department’s traffic stops continue to show racial disparities affecting Latino residents. The lingering disparities amplified Latino leaders and community members’ concerns as the second Trump administration has boosted local law enforcement’s involvement in its mass deportation campaign.
Maricopa County, home to more than half of Arizona’s population, has approved $353 million in spending related to the settlement since 2013. But an audit of the sheriff’s office spending ordered by the court and a review of the public ledger by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica show millions of dollars went to expenses that had little or nothing to do with the settlement. (The audit focused on $226 million that the sheriff’s office charged to the settlement over a 10-year period; it didn’t examine legal and monitoring costs or the two most recent department budgets.)
The auditors, who were hired by the monitor, found that nearly 72% of the sheriff’s office spending was misattributed or misappropriated. For example, the full cost of some services and salaries was assigned to the settlement when those jobs were completely unrelated or only partially related to court orders. Only $63 million was appropriately charged to the settlement, they said.
Upon releasing its findings late last year, the two-member auditing team, led by an individual with decades of experience in public finance, noted that overstating the cost of the reforms undermines the court’s credibility. “This mischaracterization misleads the public on the cost of reform efforts and calls into question MCSO’s credibility, transparency, and truthfulness of its reporting,” they stated.
The financial ledgers detail many of these expenses, including more than $310,000 for travel and professional development. Among them are $1,261 for travel in 2020 to research buying a boat and swift-water rescue training — for deputies who work in the desert, $4,070 to train and test whether to buy a horse for the mounted unit in 2021 and $5,077 to attend National Police Week in Washington, D.C., in 2023.
The audit concluded that the county Board of Supervisors, which approves the sheriff’s annual budgets, provided no “meaningful” oversight of its spending and had no process to verify if funds were being used appropriately to comply with court orders.
Indeed, as costs ballooned, the Board of Supervisors rarely questioned the expenses, Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica found based on a review of nearly a decade of public budget hearings.
The supervisors responded to the audit by telling U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow that the reforms, and in particular the audit’s scrutiny of county spending, had far exceeded the original racial profiling complaints.
“Hispanic residents of Maricopa County concerned with racial profiling are unaffected by how the County and MCSO allocate costs,” the filing read. “Nor does any member of the Class experience a constitutional violation because MCSO purchased a golf cart.”
Snow’s 2013 ruling found deputies had relied on race to pull over Latino drivers during immigration actions, violating their rights to equal protection and against unreasonable seizures.
Attorneys for the county have filed a motion to end court oversight. That motion is pending.
“Digging into county finances and trying to minimize the cost of Melendres compliance is not just an insult to taxpayers, it’s beyond the federal court’s jurisdiction,” Republican supervisors Thomas Galvin and Kate Brophy McGee said in a November statement. “Nothing about our budgeting or accounting practices violates federal or state law. This is why we decline to participate in further arguments over compliance costs.”
Sheridan, whose tenure was not covered by the audit period, dismissed the findings and defended his department’s spending practices. The sheriff’s attorneys joined the motion to end court oversight.
The past two years, the Board of Supervisors have approved Sheridan’s budget request, billing an additional $72 million to the settlement.
The auditors, William Ansbrow and Eric Melancon, are barred by Snow from speaking publicly about their work.
Steve Gallardo, the lone Democrat on the five-member Board of Supervisors, has opposed ending court oversight of the sheriff’s office. He said the focus should remain on eliminating biased policing.
The sheriff’s office is above 90% compliance with the two major court orders, but Snow has yet to clear the department in two key areas: racial disparities in traffic stops and a backlog of uninvestigated misconduct claims against deputies.
“We should be having benchmarks in terms of, how do we get in full compliance,” Gallardo told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica in April. “Others are going to say, ‘Well, they keep moving the goalpost.’ Well, let’s continue to move forward. I mean, that should be our overall goals: How do we get in full compliance with the Melendres case?”
The sheriff’s office did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions about the spending.
