The legacy of Joe Arpaio casts a big shadow over Maricopa County’s newest sheriff, Jerry Sheridan.

Sheridan was Arpaio’s chief deputy. He was implicated in the court case over the office’s racial profiling of Latinos in Maricopa County, and even held in contempt of court in the process.

But, he says now that he disagreed with Arpaio’s targeted approach to law enforcement. And he isn’t planning on assisting any further with the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts. The office is, after all, still under that court order today.

In fact, it’s one of the reasons the last Maricopa County sheriff left office early. Paul Penzone, the Democrat who ousted Arpaio, called the court-appointed monitor that still oversees MCSO today the “one cloud still hanging over this office.” He was also held in contempt of court for failing to comply with the court’s order.

Now, Sheridan wants to work to rebuild the trust that has broken down between his office and the Latino community that remembers so-called “saturation patrols” and traffic stops for broken headlights.

Sheridan recently sat down with The Show to talk more about his approach to the current anti-immigrant environment, immigration roundups and workplace raids.

Full conversation

JERRY SHERIDAN: Well, first off, we have not been asked by the federal government to become involved in their endeavor. But, we do have ICE agents, two ICE agents that are embedded in our intake process. So when somebody gets arrested, they come off the street, by Phoenix PD or any other 22 municipalities, they'll bring them in our intake, and we get about 250 a day on average.

Every one of those 250 people have to go to and talk to the ICE agents. They double check for their residency status, their citizen status, so that kind of thing. So everyone that comes through our system gets checked by ICE, and sometimes they'll put a detainer on them, and it's up to them. And they usually average about maybe 10 a day that they'll put a detainer on.

SHERIDAN: It hasn't changed because I'm not aware of ICE just bringing somebody in for us to hold them. So these are people that actually have committed a crime, have been arrested by a law enforcement officer for state charges. It's that simple.

GILGER: State charges. You are under a court order at MCSO from the days of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who you worked under, to basically to stay out of immigration enforcement, right, unless somebody has committed a state crime. How do you ride that line? Like, what's your office's role policy to make sure that you don't overstep it?

SHERIDAN: There is no line for us. It is a solid wall, and we have not been involved in dealing with people that are in the country illegally and just for being undocumented. We don't do that. What we do is we enforce the state law.

GILGER: We have seen workplace raids in other parts of the country, potentially here in Arizona. They were a hallmark of immigration enforcement under Sheriff Joe Arpaio's reign. Would you stay away from those as well?

SHERIDAN: Yes, because again, we have a court order that we're supposed to stay away from that, and it's really a federal issue. I mean, local law enforcement can get involved if they have certain laws that are enacted, which we don't have here. So it is absolutely a federal issue at this point.

GILGER: OK, let me ask you about that court order, because you're entering the office following a Democrat who ran against Arpaio and in the kind of the wake of a lot of these things, right? You were held in contempt of court, so was the sheriff at the time. I wonder what you think about how Penzone left office, right? He left a little early saying, “basically my hands are tied because of this court order. I cannot run this office the way I want to.” Are you concerned about that?

SHERIDAN: Well, he was also held in contempt twice, right? And so I'm sure he was frustrated just like, just like I am, because you, you run for sheriff and you get elected by the people, and I got well over a million votes from, basically a support of over a million people here in Maricopa County. And I cannot run the sheriff's office the way I see fit because everything has to go through the monitor process and the plaintiff's council has to approve things and even transferring people.

So I can see where Sheriff Penzone was very frustrated with that. And I am, too, but I've learned how to deal with it back, when I worked for, I was the chief deputy for Sheriff Joe. So, I knew very well coming into this job this was going to be a problem, but this is also gonna be a problem that we can solve.

GILGER: So do you anticipate being able to get out from under those court orders to comply?

SHERIDAN: I, well, let me just say Paul Penzone’s staff, I haven't really changed very many of them because they're a bunch of dedicated employees, deputy sheriffs, detention officers, civilian employees that have been working damn hard to comply with the court's order, and we're going to continue doing that.

GILGER: What are some of the barriers to that from your point of view so far?

SHERIDAN: Well, barriers are measurements, and a measurement on how long it takes to make a traffic stop. How many Hispanic drivers did you stop compared to white drivers? You know, all those kinds of things are measured. And you would think there would be a baseline of what acceptable behavior is on the part of a deputy sheriff, but there really isn't.

And we're, we're, I believe we're the only law enforcement agency in the country that is actually doing this and getting this deep involved in our traffic stops, or traffic stop data, the review of the body-worn cameras on every traffic stop and bringing the deputies in after they make a traffic stop and discussing it with them and and all that.

So I'm very confident there's no racial profiling, there is no racial bias going on at the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, and there hasn't been for 10 years. And so the frustration is how do we finish this? How do we tie this package up into a bow so we can present it to the judge? And that's the part of the problem because the court monitor is really the one that needs to do that. And he says he's not really prepared to do that yet.

GILGER: So you have a monitor you're dealing with, but you're also dealing with Judge Murray Snow, who was overseeing the case when, you know, when all of this happened initially, accused you of lying to him, basically … held you in contempt of court. Do you think that that relationship, that history could make this harder?

SHERIDAN: Well, I'd like to tell all your listeners out there, I was never untruthful. Never. He, he, he just couldn't understand something that I was trying to tell him. He said I was less than truthful. Those are the words he used. You know, this came up during the campaign, you know, during one of the debates, they asked me this question out of left field. I wasn't prepared for it. “Well, what do you think the judge is gonna say if you become the sheriff? What do you think he's gonna think?”

And I think he's gonna be happy. He's gonna be happy because I know this system, I know the court order, I know the monitor and all the people involved, so I can get there from day one and continue to comply, like I did, up until the very last day I worked there in December of 2016. We worked hard for three years to build that foundation for compliance and it looks like now, maybe I might have the opportunity to finish it up.

GILGER: So you, you talked about frustrations with trying to comply with this court order and all of the kind of steps you have to go through in very basic things to try to comply with it. Do you agree though with the findings? Do you think that the sheriff's department at the time under you and Arpaio was racially profiling?

SHERIDAN: I don't believe we were racially profiling. What we did as an organization that I didn't agree with when we were doing it, by the way, was targeting Hispanic neighborhoods to do saturation patrols. And that's not a good way to do law enforcement. And, we had lengthy discussions with Sheriff Arpaio about that back in those days. And, you know, he was the sheriff, so he did what he wanted to do.

GILGER: The court found that you violated the civil rights of Latino citizens. Now coming back into office, how do you rebuild with those communities? How do you build trust, which is so important, as we know between law enforcement and the community in which it works?

SHERIDAN: I've been working very hard at that even during the campaign, you know, the town of Guadalupe is one of our contract towns that we provide the full law enforcement service to them. I reached out to the mayor, got the mayor's support and some of the council members, the chairman of the Pascua Yaqui tribe, which is a large population in Guadalupe, he supported me. I've gone to lunch with some of the leaders of Chicano's Por La Casa in the past month, and, just a week and a half ago, I had the Mexican consulate in my office.

So I've been doing everything that I possibly can with the leadership of the Hispanic community here in Maricopa County. It's the zealots, the agitators that don't want to believe the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office is not a racist organization that continue to beat the drum. And that's just a false narrative on their part. And the deputies that we have working for us, working for you, every citizen in this county are good people doing a great job.

GILGER: Especially amid the sort of mass deportation, anti-immigrant environment that we're in right now politically, and the big conversation that's happening around that right now. Do you anticipate that being a further challenge?

SHERIDAN: No.

GILGER: Simple as that.

SHERIDAN: Simple as that.

GILGER: Let me ask you about efforts at the state Capitol to pass some legislation this session that would have to do with you, right? It would compel law enforcement to cooperate with ICE. It sounds like your department is doing that. What kind of challenge would laws like that pose to your agency, given that court order though and given the stipulation that it has to be somebody accused of or arrested for a state crime?

SHERIDAN: Correct. The biggest problem we would have is funding. Because as of right now, I, matter of fact, I just read the bill before I came here and there's no funding for law enforcement anywhere, especially for the sheriffs, because housing individuals is an expensive endeavor and it costs about $145 a day to keep somebody in the county jail. And so those numbers can add up pretty darn quick. And so, if you're gonna mandate laws, you need to also provide the resources and the funding for us to enforce those laws.

GILGER: And funding may be one thing, but staffing is also a big issue for MCSO right now, right, in terms of just not having the deputies, not having the correctional officers to do the work.

SHERIDAN: It's very critical right now. And we're about 840 detention officers short. About 100, 120 deputies short, and when you only have 740 deputies, that's a pretty big impact. But really when you look at it, the people that show up to work every day is about 50% of what staffing levels should be.

And that's not good for the officers in the jail. They have the toughest job in law enforcement. They also get the least amount of respect, and they have, what I consider the most important part in the criminal justice system is keeping the bad guys behind bars. And so their staff, they're working overtime and you know, that gets old after a while. It's the same thing with deputies. Deputies work a lot of overtime and you know, fatigue can set in, they can make mistakes, you know, bad things can happen. You can drive a car, fall asleep, because you just work two shifts in a row, you know, you're not thinking right. And so it does have impacts on us, with the staffing level, not just from you know, how many inmates we can house.

GILGER: So how do you change that? How do you change the narrative?

SHERIDAN: Well, I just came from Scottsdale Community College. We were doing a recruitment out there, and the sheriff himself went out there and [was] shaking hands. I had a couple of people I talked to, and that's how you do it. You go out there and there's a lot of people that want to get involved in law enforcement and, we just need to go out there and find them and recruit them to come work for us.

GILGER: Last question for you, sheriff. You have said many times throughout this campaign that you are not Joe Arpaio. How do you want to be different?

SHERIDAN: Well, I am not Joe Arpaio because I don't enjoy the media attention. And, matter of fact, I've turned down some media interviews because that's not who I am. I, I, I've always been an operations person, and that means to get things done and do that. And it was always good when I worked for Arpaio, because he wanted to do it all, and that was great because I didn't want to do any of it.

But now that I'm the sheriff, I've got to go out there and let the people know, again, all 4.6 million people. I work for them. They elected me as their sheriff, and so I also need to communicate because they're my bosses. “Hey boss, this is what we did today,” and, I, I'm gonna need to use the media to be able to do that.

GILGER: That's a big difference.

SHERIDAN: That's a huge difference because it's not something that I seek and enjoy.

GILGER: OK, well, I appreciate you coming in for an interview then. That is Maricopa County Sheriff Jerry Sheridan joining us. Thank you very much.

SHERIDAN: Thank you.