8 Oct 23rd-Oct 29th, 2025 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | Not Adding Up How the sheriff’s office milked a racial profiling case it lost for $163 million. BY STEPHEN LEMONS I t may be way past time for some Maricopa County supervisors to eat a ginormous steaming plate of crow pie. Back in July, during a community meeting about the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office’s efforts to follow a judge’s orders from the decade-old racial profiling suit Melendres v. Arpaio, several Republican officials lambasted the ongoing need to comply with them. Appearing at the quarterly meeting for the first time, GOP county supervisors Debbie Lesko and Thomas Galvin lamented the more than $350 million the suit is projected to cost taxpayers since 2013. “This $350 million could have been used to hire more sheriff’s deputies,” Lesko said as Sheriff Jerry Sheridan and Robert Warshaw, the agency’s court- appointed monitor, looked on. Instead, she said, the money was being spent on “federal bureaucracy and red tape.” Playing the rabble-rouser, Galvin rose to address the assembled crowd, which included armed sheriff’s office supporters who had come from outside of the largely Hispanic West Valley area where the meeting was being held. He berated Warshaw, praised Sheridan and said the money allocated to the monitor each year should instead “be in the streets.” If fiscal responsibility is the goal, though, Lesko and Galvin appear to have been barking up the wrong tree. Instead, as they say in slasher pics, the call was coming from inside the house. On Oct. 8, federal judge G. Murray Snow released a 93-page report from the monitor that claimed the sheriff’s office was improperly using money earmarked for compliance with Snow’s orders in the Melendres case. Instead of going directly toward efforts to police the Valley’s Latino communities without bias — and instead of going “in the streets” — tens of millions of dollars were spent on things like: parking; car washes; a new office for the sheriff’s Professional Standards Bureau; a golf cart; travel to Washington, D.C.; training for “mounted patrol;” research into water- craft; and the hiring of dozens of sergeants that the monitor’s accountants say did no work related to Melendres. The bombshell report also recounts in excruciating detail how the sheriff’s office treated the Melendres fund like a piggy bank. the agency improperly blamed the court for $163 million in purported compli- ance costs — or 72% of the $226 million that the county has spent on Melendres, excluding legal fees, from 2014 to 2024. As a result, both the county and the sheriff’s office may have violated state laws on spending limits to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. The misspending and misallocation revealed by the audit span the administra- tions of four sheriffs: Joe Arpaio, Paul Penzone, Russ Skinner and now Sheridan, who was Arpaio’s chief deputy and was elected to office in November 2024. The makeup of the five-member Board of Supervisors has also changed several times between 2014 and 2024. The only person on the board now who was on it in 2014 is the board’s lone Democrat, Steve Gallardo, who has always been outgunned 4-to-1 by Republicans. A day after the report was released, Galvin remained steadfast in his support of Sheridan, saying in a statement that the Board of Supervisors was reviewing Snow’s report with its legal counsel and would subsequently offer a reply to the court. “The Board has confidence in MCSO’s budgeting team and will respond accord- ingly,” Galvin said. Yet, the way the report tells it, the super- visors’ “confidence” in the sheriff’s office bean counters was severely misplaced — either intentionally or unintentionally. Robbing Peter Snow ordered the financial review in September 2024, noting that the sheriff’s office had been identifying Melendres- related expenses simply as “operational costs” in annual reports submitted to the court by the agency. The sheriff’s office had failed “to provide support for the amounts attributed or an explanation of the underlying costs,” he wrote, giving the sheriff’s office 30 days to turn over the receipts to the monitor’s staff. True to form, the sheriff’s office dragged its heels, finally “complying” in December with a massive data dump that involved, according to the report, “over 8,900 digital files” and “raw ledger data containing over 125,000 individual data entries.” If the monitor wanted to know where the money was going, its budget analysts would have to “sort through and organize” the morass. Sort and organize they did, only to learn that the sheriff’s office had been conducting a spending spree for non- Melendres-related expenses, which county officials apparently rubber- stamped without checking to see if they comported with Snow’s orders. The county “does not monitor or audit whether Melendres funds are spent appropriately,” the report states, and this >> p 12 | NEWS |
