When is a Sheriff not a Law Man?

Unfunnily enough, it's when an AZ sheriff with a history of human rights violations ignores literally hundreds of sex-crime violations.  I don't find the two things to be unconnected: actually, I tend to think that the kind of personality that is at home with strutting prisoners about in pink underwear or chaining pregnant immigrant women might be too busy pursuing made-up crimes against people he has a personal beef with, than following up on actual crimes against real victims.

Just based upon his self-promotional activities, vis a vis books, tv, swag, it looks to the concerned outsider that Sheriff Arpaio believes that his job is to serve, protect, and promote--Joe Arpaio. His treatment of the prisoners that have come under his authority has been historically horrible, whimsical, and publicized--by no less than himself.  This kind of authoritarian behavior suggests to me the kind of mentality that might not take sexual abuse crimes that seriously, because, after all, how are people supposed to be treated, anyway?  Just what is human dignity, and what should victims expect, in the face of someone with more power?

He didn't pursue those cases because he didn't see the point.  It wasn't just the incompetence of not knowing how or deciding roughing up brown people was more important to him; he didn't see the problem, there.  In his world, bad things happen to people, and if it happened, well--

Who is he to say whether they deserved it or not?  This is all of a piece with the assumptions of rape culture, is it not? If these complainants were there to be victimized--are they really victims? And what of the perpetrators?  Following out that thought, the idea that he didn't see those people, those abusers, the rapists and the pedophiles, the violent sociopaths that hurt other people because they had the power to do so, disturbs me precisely because his practice of the law seems so much to be about hurting people because he has the power to do so.

And I just find myself despairing of justice where there are people appointed to carry out the law, who seem so unsuited for it.  Sheriff Arpaio strikes me as exactly the worst type of person to be given authority--the idea of justice just isn't in him-only punishment for being caught, or weaker. His example is egregious, but I doubt he's alone.