Sheriff Joe's Posse Would Like To Surprise Your Children With An Armed Sex Offender

Remember last month? Last month was fun, what with all the jibber-jabber about how armed guards in schools would keep all the children safesies. Marching at the very head of that parade of stupid was our old friend Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who sent in armed posses without actually checking with the school. Hey! What school, in this day and age, could possibly be concerned when a bunch of gun-toting civilians show up without warning?

Sheriff Joe's posse also had a bit of a quality control problem , what with the dude that beat his wife, the dude that spit on a police officer, and the dude that held another driver at gunpoint. We thought it would be tough to top that terrible, but we really underestimated ol' Sheriff Joe:

Today we find out that the posse reportedly included at least one man convicted of sex crimes against children.  And even worse, and what no one has apparently yet realized : The convicted child sex criminal posse member worked for Arpaio for years in the Sheriff’s office until he was arrested in 2009.

See what we mean? QUALITY CONTROL, PEOPLE. Vet your posse members better! Even, say, a background check would be dreamy. You might even just check, say, your own past employees, like the illustrious Dominic Butler, who got arrested back in 2009 (while working for Maricopa County, yo!) for soliciting sex with teenage girls via the improbably named PhoneZoo.com. The conviction resulted in the not-unusual-in-this-sort-of-crime order to stay the hell away from - you guessed it - children.

Oh well. Surely he's much better now, and well suited for weaponry around children. That must for sure be the case, because Sheriff Joe has an awesome track record on being both tough and timely on sex crimes that involve children:  

Delays may have led to some cases never being prosecuted. For example, the Sheriff’s Office delayed for five years an investigation into an allegation against a convicted rapist. While the inquiry was on hold, another agency received an allegation that the same suspect had assaulted a teenage girl. In another case, the Sheriff’s Office ignored for a year one girl’s allegation that a horse trainer had molested her. The suspect was accused of molesting three more girls before being indicted.

Don't mind us. We'll just be over here in the corner weeping with equal parts sorrow because WTF and joy because thank god we do not live in Maricopa County.

[ AmericaBlog/  Arizona Republic ]