The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has charged over $200 million in expenditures to a class-action settlement intended to eliminate racial profiling within the department. These costs include more than $7,000 for cable TV subscriptions, an $11,000 golf cart, $703,000 for renovations to office space in an upscale Phoenix high-rise, and an additional $1.7 million for Tasers. In 2013, a federal judge ruled that the department, led at the time by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, had breached the constitutional rights of Latino drivers, prompting the court to mandate extensive reforms. These steps involve recording every traffic stop to identify signs of racial bias, hiring more investigators to examine allegations of deputy wrongdoing, and naming an independent monitor to supervise the settlement. Since Sheriff Jerry Sheridan assumed office last year, he and the Republican members of the county Board of Supervisors have pointed to the expense of meeting these requirements as grounds for terminating the agreement in the case referred to as Melendres v. Arpaio — even as analyses of the department’s traffic stops continue to reveal racial disparities impacting Latino residents. Concerns among Latino leaders and community members have been heightened by the persistent disparities, as the second Trump administration ramps up local law enforcement’s role in its mass deportation efforts. Since 2013, Maricopa County—which is home to more than half of Arizona’s population—has authorized $353 million in expenditures tied to the settlement. An audit of the sheriff’s office spending, ordered by the court, along with a review of the public ledger by Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica, reveals that millions of dollars were spent on expenses that had little or nothing to do with the settlement. The audit examined $226 million in settlement charges made by the sheriff’s office across a 10-year span, but did not review associated legal or monitoring expenses, nor the department’s two most recent budgets. The auditors, hired by the monitor, discovered that almost 72% of the sheriff’s office expenditures had been misattributed or misappropriated. For instance, the entire expense of certain services and salaries was charged to the settlement, even though those positions had no connection—or only a partial one—to the court orders.
