the desert gadabout

40 inspirational speeches in 2 minutes

Patriotism in the dumpster? This should put make you raise your head a little higher …

Stove Ownership

Goldwater Institute: Limit the sheriff’s power

The conservative/libertarian credentials of the Goldwater Institute should be unassailable, so imagine my surprise when they released a report last night that more or less expanded on my previous post.

In Mission Unaccomplished: The Misplaced Priorities of the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Office, GI’s Clint Bolick proposes new legislation that would limit the county sheriff to operating jails, coordinating warrants, and patroling unincorporated areas. I offer even the third portion could be trimmed from the MCSO’s responsibilities. Let those areas contract with the local cities and towns, or purchase service from Rural/Metro — or just incorporate to the city and/or town.

GI’s argument is based not on a personal beef with Arpaio but classic conservative/libertarian concerns of big government and mismanagement. Bolick writes:

MCSO falls seriously short of fulfilling its mission in all three areas. Although MCSO is adept at self-promotion and is an unquestionably “tough” law-enforcement agency, under its watch violent crime rates recently have soared, both in absolute terms and relative to other jurisdictions. It has diverted resources away from basic law-enforcement functions to highly publicized immigration sweeps, which are ineffective in policing illegal immigration and in reducing crime generally, and to extensive trips by MCSO officials to Honduras for purposes that are nebulous at best. Profligate spending on those diversions helped produce a financial crisis in late 2007 that forced MCSO to curtail or reduce important law-enforcement functions.

In terms of support services, MCSO has allowed a huge backlog of outstanding warrants to accumulate, and has seriously disadvantaged local police departments by closing satellite booking facilities. MCSO’s detention facilities are subject to costly lawsuits for excessive use of force and inadequate medical services. Compounding the substantive problems are chronically poor record-keeping and reporting of statistics, coupled with resistance to public disclosure.

That’s not a print reporter, and it’s definitely not New Times. That’s criticism coming from the other direction, from an organization named after the so-called “Father of the Modern Republican Party.”

Arpaio’s response in the Republic is unusually careful and restrained:

When you talk about the Civil Liberties Union, I think they treat me better than this guy does … I never had any trouble in 14 years with the Goldwater Institute, and I’ve done a lot of controversial things.

No one was talking about the ACLU, Joe, but it’s nice to know you’re at least paying attention.

Does Maricopa County really need a sheriff?

Before you assume this post is full of bias, of course it is. I think Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a reckless man who cares more about publicity than maintaining jails or keeping people safe.

But dwelling on this issue has led me to a revelatory question I think we should have been asking ourselves since greater Phoenix become a sprawling metropolis of incorporated cities and towns:

Does Maricopa County really need a sheriff?

Save for a few unincorporated bubbles that could be better served — with much better response times — by a reinvigorated Rural Metro corporation, every city and town in the county already has its own police department.  In fact, with the help of ICE, those same police departments have done a better job tracking down illegal immigrant felons than Sheriff Joe. But Arpaio as a much better PR department, so he stays flush with voters while other police departments are actually taking dangerous people off the street (and sending them back across the border).

All we really need is a competent warden/administrator to run a county jail, something Arpaio seems incapable of. We’ve spent tens of millions of dollars paying off lawsuits due to MCSO’s ineptitude under Arpaio, and our insurance rates have quintupled since Arpaio has taken office. There’s more than $100 million more in suits against the county because Arpaio refuses to actually manage his own jail. He co-mingles dangerous felons with pedestrian offenders, one source of the problem.

How much money could we save by cutting the sheriff’s department budget out of our expenditures entirely? And how much more embarrassment could we save our community by eliminating Sheriff Joe’s job? You’d think with real fiscal hawks like Don Stapley on the Board of Supervisors, this would be a no-brainer. I’ve met Don. He believes in limited government, epsecially when it comes to spending money.

So, Don, how about my idea? I think we could save the county millions. Maybe tens of millions. And a lot of grief.

Gilbert: New home of the NIMBYs

As white people rush to relieve their guilt and proclaim the death of racism in America with the election of Barack Obama, we get this story from Gilbert where NIMBYs are upset the new high school will be named in Spanish.

The new high school, Campo Verde — literally “Green Field,” has the upper-middle class neighborhood up in arms. Comments from the peanut-job gallery include criticism the name is too “ghetto” and that it “sounds like the name of a prison camp.”

Makes you wonder what they think of the historic and verdant desert campgrounds off I-17 on the way to Flagstaff. Perhaps they consider the cliff dwellings at Montezuma’s Castle “too urban.”

Or maybe Gilbert just hasn’t imported enough civilization from other parts of the country to out-grow the ignorant rural attitudes of the former “Hay Capitol of the World.”

It’s not a train, but …

The private sector apparently sees a financial incentive in public transportation, so they’re discussing putting their money where their mouth is.

A downtown trolley that runs until 2 a.m.? Welcome to the big city!

Sort of.

American newspapers, 1690 - 2008

The Christian Science Monitor is folding it’s newspaper print edition, opting instead to become entirely digital.

While CSM faced unusual challenges very different from your local daily — namely, it’s delivery was entirely through the U.S. Postal Service — we can expect to see reports like this over the next decade. We might as well call it the death of the American newspaper.

Expect to see smaller, community print editions to disappear over night, with the big city dailies folding one by one until all that’s left (probably) is the Wall Street Journal and (maybe) the big New York and LA dailies.

Everyone will still have a local digital edition, of course, but staffing will be much smaller because online doesn’t offer the kind of revenues print did. Local reporting will disappear, with Google, Yahoo!, and television stations responsible for holding local gov’t responsible.

Right. Good luck with that.

George Johnson poops on Arizona

Arizona has a 100-year history of crooked developers who think the Sonoran Desert needs a lot of improvement, but George Johnson probably takes the cake when it comes to general indifference to our beautiful state.

Turns out he’s been dumping human waste in the desert.

So when will Arpaio be investigated?

Is the presidential race over?

A survey of multiple polls measured against the electoral college seems to reveal Barack is but one or two swing states from closing this up.

The current tally:

Obama: 264
McCain: 163

This is the reality McCain is facing: Wherever he’s extremely popular, it’s in places that don’t have large urban populations. The map lists Florida as a swing state, but polling has voters there consistently learning towards Obama.