Information Blockade

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?"

In August, the sheriff lost his appeals court bid to continue freezing out the View. He's appealed again to the Arizona Supreme Court. If he loses there, the cost to taxpayers for defending against the suit will rise from about $50,000 to roughly $100,000 — because he'll have to pay not just Wilenchik's legal fees, but the View's.

What happened to the View is only one of the sheriff's most visible attacks on the media. His office kicks reporters who have offended him out of press conferences, tips off competitors to exclusive work of offending media, makes reporters working on critical stories view information from inside his jails, and subjects disliked journalists to harassment by his deputies.

Moving to the top of Arpaio's hit list in the last couple of years are media outlets whose audiences contain the illegal immigrants his and the County Attorney's offices are targeting in sweeping campaigns aimed at keeping Thomas and Arpaio on the minds of an anti-migrant voting public. As he did with the West Valley View, Arpaio denies vital public-safety information to blacklisted Spanish-language media.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio has never been fair about releasing public records that might show corruption or malfeasance in his office.

Arizona's public records law is pretty simple. It says: "Public records and other matters in the custody of any [government] officer shall be open to inspection by any person at all times during office hours," and that any person may request to examine documents or obtain copies.

The only problem is, when a government bureaucrat blows off a citizen's request for records, his only recourse is to sue in Superior Court. And there's a risk: If you don't win, you have to pay your own legal fees. But there's no risk to the sheriff personally in stonewalling records requests, since the public pays his lawyers' bills.