Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) is a local law enforcement agency that serves Maricopa County in Arizona and id headed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio. It provides general service as well as specialized law enforcement to unincorporated areas of Maricopa county as well as unincorporated areas of the county and also manages the county jail system. It is one of the most talked about Sheriffs offices in the country and has over 2000 convicts living in tents and serving over 9200 square miles with a philosophy of zero tolerance (MCSO, 2015). Its vision is to be fully integrated law enforcement agency committed to being a leader and establishing the standards from providing professional service, detention and support services to the citizens of Maricopa …show more content…
This practice was continued during the Jim Crow era and now is still prevalent in the 21st Century. It was not until June 2001 till a web based Racial Profiling Data Collection Resource Center was created with the help of the Department of Justice to be a central clearing house for police agencies, legislators, community leaders and others to access information about current collection efforts, legislation and model policies, police community initiates and methological tools that can be used to collect and analyze racial profiling data. After this was made in 2003 the department of justice issued the Guidance Regarding the Use of Race by Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Policy that forbids racial profiling by law enforcement officials. The new Policy the Guidance supersedes the 2003 policy and builds upon as well as expands its framework and ensures that law enforcement agencies conduct their activities in an unbiased manner (Guidance, 2014). It emphasizes that biased practices are unfair and promote mistrust of law enforcement and perpetuates negative as well as harmful stereotypes (Guidance, 2014, p. 1). It also stresses that these same biased practices as demonstrated by the MCSO are very …show more content…
The first is making routine or spontaneous law enforcement decisions such as ordinary traffic stops, where federal law enforcement officers may not any characteristics such as the use of race/ethnicity, gender, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation to any degree (Guidance, 2014, p. 1). The second standard when conducting all activities other than routine or spontaneous law enforcement activities, federal officers may consider race, ethnicity gender etc. only to the extent that there is trustworthy information relevant to the time frame that links a person to a particular listed characteristic to an identified criminal incident, organization, scheme, a threat to national or homeland security, or violation to immigration law or authorized intelligence activity (Guidance, 2014, p. 1). However in order to rely on the listed characteristic, law enforcement officers must also reasonably believe that the law enforcement, security or intelligence activity to be undertaken is merited under the totality of the circumstances such as any temporal exigency and the nature of any potential harm to be averted (Guidance, 2014, p. 1). The Constitution protects against invidious use of irrelevant individual characteristics and stresses this should not be the sole basis of law enforcement action but the guidance policy itself sets requirements beyond the constitutional minimum that shall apply to the use of race, ethnicity, gender etc. by