Information Blockade

Maricopa County law enforcement violated the constitutional rights of this newspaper and its readers in October, going so far as to subpoena the identities of anyone who'd looked at New Times online in the past four years. When the paper's leaders revealed the apparent grand jury probe on our cover, they were arrested.

It wasn't much of a leap for Sheriff Joe Arpaio and County Attorney Andrew Thomas to go after a publication that's uncovered abuses in their offices for years. They'd already proven themselves adept at trampling the rights of prisoners, political enemies, and Mexican migrants.

Arpaio sought criminal prosecution of New Times for publishing his address in 2004 as part of our investigation of his commercial real estate transactions, and Thomas responded by appointing a special prosecutor who subpoenaed not only the records and e-mails of the paper's writers and editors, but information on the Internet-viewing habits of our readers.

Public outrage, sparked by the arrests of the paper's top executives, forced the county attorney to drop charges of violating grand jury secrecy against Village Voice Media executive editor Michael Lacey and CEO Jim Larkin. It also forced him to drop the Arpaio-inspired probe of the paper for supposedly violating an arcane law that makes it illegal to publish law officers' addresses in cyberspace but allows such publication in newspapers and magazines.

This week we examine what led up to Thomas' stunning mea culpa. We look not only at New Times' 14-year investigation of the sheriff's office, but also at what other media have published and broadcast on Arpaio — and what he's done to reporters or news outlets who've crossed him.

Nobody has clashed with the sheriff more than New Times. We've written about his cruel law-enforcement policies and his quest — at almost any cost — for flattering publicity. But much of the discord has been over his refusal to give up public records that could prove corruption. This publication has sued him three times over his flouting of legal requests for records.

The tiny West Valley View also has sued the sheriff. He refused to provide basic information — which he was giving to media he favors — to the paper. He even refused to tip it to a serial child predator's roaming the neighborhoods the paper serves. The View's sin: criticizing Arpaio's tactics over the years.

But it doesn't stop with New Times and the View. He's punished individual reporters at other media for bucking him. And he's refused to provide basic public-safety information to offending Spanish-language media — which critics suspect is part of his campaign against illegal immigrants.

This installment of our continuing series "Target Practice" goes below the surface to find out how we arrived at a place where the sheriff can punish media that displease him, and hide information that could make him look bad in violation of the Arizona public records law.

---

At the beginning of the 2006 school year, Sheriff Joe Arpaio's animosity toward a local newspaper wound up endangering elementary school children.

Arpaio and his public information office prevented the paper and the community it serves near Luke Air Force Base from learning about a child predator roaming the area.

"The Sheriff's Office should give information to the local paper — period," says Thomas Heck, who retired earlier this year after 19 years as superintendent of the Litchfield Park Elementary School District.

The would-be kidnapper struck on September 15, 2006, just a few blocks from the Wigwam Golf Resort and Spa. His target was a student walking home alone from Wigwam Creek Middle School. The guy hopped out of a compact car driven by another man and grabbed her, but she wrestled with him and got away.

The girl's school notified the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office and sent a notice of the attack to parents. Lucky thing for the Wigwam kids and their families.

Because the Sheriff's Office sent no information about the incident to the West Valley View — which also is the neighborhood news source for parents and students at the area's two Catholic schools, a Lutheran school, and other non-district schools, like Litchfield Park's Crown Charter School.

The View, which publishes on the Internet and delivers print copies each Tuesday and Friday to 70,000 homes in the west-side communities of Avondale, Goodyear and Litchfield Park, has been cut off by the Sheriff's Office for years.

If the View's readers never learned of the prowling pervert, the Sheriff's Office couldn't have cared less.

A suspect fitting the description of the man in the first incident struck again five days later (again, the child got away), but the Sheriff's Office refused to tell the View, the only newspaper that covers such crime in the neighborhood. There's no evidence that the attempted abductions made the Arizona Republic or Valley broadcast media.

At the time, the MCSO was paying private attorney Dennis Wilenchik taxpayer dollars to defend it against a public records lawsuit brought by the View. County Attorney Andrew Thomas appointed Wilenchik to represent Arpaio. The paper wasn't demanding sensitive information regarding a criminal investigation, or even internal documents from the Sheriff's Office that might hurt Arpaio politically. All it wanted was the same timely press releases that most other Valley media receive each day so it could inform readers about problems such as child abductors in the neighborhood.

The newspaper, headed by publisher Elliot Freireich, has an adversarial history with the Sheriff's Office that began long before the lawsuit was filed in October 2005.

In February of that year, Arpaio was blasted in an editorial for demanding fingerprints from motorists in traffic stops. In July 2005, View staff photographer Owen Martin wrote an opinion piece bashing the MCSO for the heavy-handed way deputies treated the media at crime scenes, comparing Arpaio to Adolf Hitler and calling his deputies Nazis.

Perhaps sparked by these incidents, the MCSO claimed the View wasn't using the sheriff's press releases in a "fruitful" manner, and that fall Arpaio's office exacted revenge.

Captain Paul Chagolla, the sheriff's chief spokesman, quit sending the paper e-mailed press releases, telling its reporters that if they wanted them, they must ask for each one individually in a formal public records request, and then retrieve the belated information at the sheriff's downtown Phoenix location, 20 miles away.

Having to travel so far to retrieve the information posed an obvious problem for a short-staffed neighborhood paper, but, beyond that, it takes weeks or months for the MCSO to honor public records requests — if it honors them at all. Certain events are too pressing for the public to be kept in the dark.

The View sued and won a Superior Court ruling against Arpaio in June 2006. Judge Margaret Downie agreed that the law doesn't say the sheriff has to put the View on his e-mail list, but she ruled that he does have to honor the View's request to see all press releases on the same day they're released to the other media.

Downie called the sheriff's blockade of information to the View "petty."

True to form, the Sheriff's Office didn't give up. More money was shoveled to Wilenchik, who appealed the ruling, and the MCSO was still shutting out the paper by that September, when the predator incidents occurred.

The second attempted kidnapping involved a 10-year-old pupil at Avondale's Corte Sierra Elementary school. The girl saw the predator approaching and ran away.

Superintendent Heck wrote a second letter to parents in his district, and forwarded the letter to the View, which soon published a prominent article on both attacks. In it, a parent noted that perhaps the second attack wouldn't have taken place had the first one been well-publicized.

Soon after, Heck found out the Sheriff's Office had produced composite sketches of two suspects — the man who attempted to grab the children and the driver of the car — but refused to give them to the newspaper. So he paid a visit to Wigwam Creek Elementary, where the school resource officers are sheriff's deputies (the school is on unincorporated land). Sure enough, the deputies had the sketches.

Heck persuaded them to give him copies, and he delivered them to the View, which soon published the pictures along with another article.

"It seems to me that it's not good policy to withhold information from a local newspaper that affects children or the community," Heck says.

Arpaio and his public-information office apparently disagree.

When the View published an opinion column about the MCSO's refusal to divulge the predator incidents to the paper — under the headline, "Sheriff as dangerous as a child predator" — the Sheriff's private lawyer, Wilenchik, threatened to sue the paper for libel:

"Your newspaper continues to repeatedly publish articles and editorials mischaracterizing [Arpaio, the Sheriff's Office and the View's public-records lawsuit]," but "now you have gone too far."

Wilenchik asked the View's editors in his lengthy rant: "Have you no decency at all?"