Arpaio´s Racial Profiling Crap About to Hit the Holder Fan!

Eric Holder, Obama´s choice for Attorney General will bring fresh eyes to Sheriff Arpaio´s history of Racial Profiling, including the 4 current Racial Profiling suits against him. Holder is a long time advocate of ending Racial Profiling. It looks like Arpaio´s Racial Profiling Crap is about to Hit the Holder Fan!!

Arizona Republic reports:

Arpaio's sweeps to get fresh scrutiny?

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's crackdown on illegal immigrants could get greater scrutiny from federal investigators under President-elect Barack Obama's administration, criminal-justice experts say. A telltale clue to that possibility is Obama's top choice to head the U.S. Justice Department, Eric Holder, who has a track record of investigating the kind of racial-profiling allegations leveled at Arpaio's crime and immigration sweeps. Arpaio denies his deputies have stopped or arrested people based on race.

As deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Holder played a key role in the Justice Department's investigation of the New Jersey state police in the late 1990s that showed officers were disproportionately stopping Blacks for minor traffic stops to look for drugs. During a Senate subcommittee hearing involving the investigation, Holder, who is an African-American and the son of an immigrant from Barbados, said he had become particularly sensitive to complaints of racial profiling after New Jersey police searched his trunk for guns when he was a college student. He said he believed the incident stemmed from racial profiling.
The Justice Department's investigation led to New Jersey state police signing a consent decree that required officers to fully document all traffic stops as part of an effort to ensure they weren't stopping motorists on the basis of race. The department's civil-rights division under Democratic President Clinton launched several investigations of local police departments accused of using racial profiling. Such investigations fell dormant under Republican President Bush's administration. With Obama, "I expect that the rules will change somewhat and you will probably see a more active role of the Justice Department investigating cases of police misconduct across the board," said Michael Smith, chairman of the criminology and criminal-justice department at the University of South Carolina.

Allegations
In April, Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking that the Justice Department's civil-rights division and the FBI investigate Arpaio's immigration crackdowns. He alleged that the sweeps included "a pattern and practice of conduct that includes discriminatory harassment, improper stops, searches and arrests." Gordon sent the letter after Arpaio moved dozens of deputies into neighborhoods with large Latino populations in Phoenix and Guadalupe to conduct what the sheriff called crime-suppression patrols. The patrols ignited an outcry from Latino community leaders and immigrant advocates, who accused deputies of pulling over people who looked Latino in order to look for illegal immigrants. Four U.S. citizens and a legal immigrant have filed a lawsuit against Arpaio, accusing him and deputies of violating their civil rights in connection with the immigration crackdowns.
An Arizona Republic examination of arrest logs from eight crime sweeps showed that deputies arrested more Latinos than non-Latinos during each of the operations; that even when the patrols were held in mostly White areas deputies arrested more Latinos than non-Latinos; and that deputies arrested Latinos in greater numbers than non-Latinos following minor traffic violations.
Gordon said he believes that under the Obama administration, the Justice Department will take a harder look at the concerns raised in his letter. "The ball for civil rights has started rolling, and I'm confident that under soon-to-be Attorney General Holder, it will be rolling faster here and across the nation," Gordon said.
Hector Yturralde, president of Somos America, an immigrant-advocacy group that is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said he expects the Justice Department to pay more attention to complaints of racial profiling against Arpaio's department. "We do have high aspirations of this new attorney general because something has to be done. So far our cries have fallen on deaf ears," Yturralde said.
Arpaio said he is not concerned that his office could face greater scrutiny under the Obama administration.
"I don't care," Arpaio said. "I feel very comfortable with the way we do things. . . . I have confidence in my deputies, and nothing is going to change. I am going to continue my operations even though the administration is going to change." Scot Montrey, a spokesman for the Justice Department's civil-rights division, said the allegations of racial profiling against Arpaio's office were being reviewed to determine whether any action should be taken. Arpaio said he doesn't believe the Justice Department is looking any further into Gordon's letter because the complaints have no merit. "It hasn't gone anywhere because there is nothing to it," Arpaio said. Brian Withrow, a criminal-justice professor at Wichita State University, said that earlier this month he attended a national conference of the American Society of Criminology in St. Louis.
"The consensus of that group was that we will see more of a desire of this new administration to litigate these (racial profiling) cases than the current administration," Withrow said. "The president-elect has already said he intends to beef up the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice, and that is the department most likely to investigate."