American-Latino Immigrants Proudly Assisting the Community

Tarnished Justice

A new policy report, Mission Unaccomplished: The Misplaced Priorities of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, takes a candid look at what the Sheriff’s Office is doing and provides recommendations on how MCSO and other police agencies can provide more effective and efficient law enforcement services.

“The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is tasked with the important job of keeping crime rates low,” said Clint Bolick, author of the report and Goldwater Institute litigation director. “Judged by its own statistics, MCSO appears to be falling seriously short of fulfilling its core law enforcement duties.”

Among the areas Mission Unaccomplished analyzes is MCSO’s record keeping and reporting. The study finds MCSO record keeping inadequate and inaccurate. For example, each year when the Sheriff’s Office provides crime clearance statistics to the county, the figures are accompanied by the disclaimer that the data “is not considered accurate.”

The paper also examines the 166-percent increase in homicide rates between 2004 and 2007, the same period that MCSO began diverting resources to other priorities, such as trips by high-level employees to Honduras for ambiguous law enforcement activities.

Mission Unaccomplished also looks at MCSO’s closing of satellite booking facilities, immigration sweeps, and lack of transparency.

The paper recommends practical ways the Sheriff’s Office can better achieve its goals of quality law enforcement, support services, and detention, including:

• Regular audits by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors
• The legislature formally clearing up blurry jurisdictional lines
• The legislature adopting uniform standards for clearance of criminal investigations and requiring prompt, accurate reporting of clearance rates

You can read Mission Unaccomplished: The Misplaced Priorities of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office here.