Goldwater Asks Court for Transparency in Maricopa County Sheriff’s Case

The Goldwater Institute on Tuesday filed a friend of the court brief in federal court asking the judge to allow Maricopa County taxpayers see where their money has been going for the dozen years that the county sheriff’s office has been subjected to federal oversight. The brief comes in the midst of a lawsuit that asks the judge to reconsider a 2013 judgment imposing federal control over the county’s law enforcement arm and asks the judge to also reconsider a 2014 order that keeps the federal overseer’s expenditures away from taxpayers’ eyes.

The lawsuit has its origins in the policies of former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was sued by the ACLU and the Department of Justice over various law-enforcement practices. The court ordered that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department be placed under a federal monitor to oversee its policies and ensure that it complied with federal civil rights laws. Arpaio left office in 2016, however, and three sheriffs and more than 10 years later the department has reformed many of the policies that gave rise to the lawsuit. Nevertheless, the federal monitor remains in place.

That monitor is a private company known as Warshaw & Associates, and its employees submit regular invoices to the county to be paid for their services. But the details of those invoices have been kept from the public eye for well over a decade thanks to a court order that requires the firm to submit the invoices exclusively to the judge. While a county official is allowed to look at them, she’s not allowed to share their contents with anyone else, including the taxpaying public.

That means Maricopa County taxpayers have no way of knowing how their tax dollars are being spent on one of the most important services the county provides. Although the Goldwater Institute has repeatedly requested copies of these invoices, the county does not have itemized statements and the federal monitor refused to produce them. But as we point out in the brief we filed on Tuesday, the government should not be allowed to keep such information secret unless there’s good reason, and even then, they’re required to specify what those reasons are. The court in this case has never done so—and even if it had, circumstances have changed in the decade since the lawsuit began.

Now the county has filed a motion asking the judge to reconsider the oversight order in light of the changed circumstances. There’s a new sheriff and new policies, and federal monitoring can’t last forever. Our brief raises these important transparency and federalism issues, and asks the judge to also reconsider the confidentiality order in light of new circumstances so that Maricopa County taxpayers can see, at long last, exactly what they’re being required to pay for.

You can read our brief here.

Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute.