Racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio Would Like It if You Stopped Calling Him Racist

Newly pardoned former Maricopa County, AZ, sheriff Joe Arpaio has a favor to ask you: Please ignore his history of racist policing, his racist proclamations about President Barack Obama’s place of birth, and his abhorrent treatment of those in his care, and kindly stop calling him “racist.”

“Joseph M. Arpaio was not convicted for ‘racial profiling,’ as certain news outlets have inaccurately reported,” Arpaio’s attorneys said in a statement released Monday evening. “His conviction had nothing to do with race.”

The request comes as Arpaio—convicted earlier this summer for criminal contempt after refusing to stop profiling undocumented immigrants—attempts to re-enter public life, following Donald Trump’s pardon last week.

“Mr. Arpaio respectfully requests that these statements be corrected, and that the correction be published in a manner comparable to that of the original publication and be disseminated to the same audience,” the attorneys’ statement continued, before stressing that the order the former sheriff had been “convicted of ‘willfully’ violating can be accurately described as an order not to detain illegal aliens based solely on their status as illegal aliens, ‘without more.’”

Wow, consider that hair extremely split.

However, as the ACLU noted:

Arpaio ordered deputies to target residents solely based on their ethnicity, often detaining people without reasonable suspicion that they were violating any laws that his office was allowed to enforce.

In the civil rights case against Arpaio, the federal court found that Arpaio systematically targeted Latinos for traffic stops and illegally detained them.

Hmmm, a local law enforcement officer taking it upon himself to target, question, and then act upon random detainees’ immigration status based on their ethnicity? Sounds pretty racist!

Still, all this name-calling seems to really hurt the feelings of the man once dubbed “America’s Toughest Sheriff.”

“It’s not just TV, it’s elected officials,” Arpaio explained to The Arizona Republic on Monday. “You’ve got one guy here … calling me a racist, calling the president a racist. You’ve got others saying I was charged of racial profiling. That’s untrue … and my lawyer is concerned with these derogatory, slanderous statements that are going around.”

Here are a couple of other non-racist things from Arpaio’s past, courtesy of the Phoenix New Times:

Yep, a great guy!