When I Filmed Sheriff Joe Arpaio, He Was Cooperative and Horrifying
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When I Filmed Sheriff Joe Arpaio, He Was Cooperative and Horrifying
When Marianne Schaefer Trench shot a documentary about Sheriff Joe Arpaio, her crew wanted to quit, and her audience thought they were watching a mockumentary.
MARIANNE SCHAEFER TRENCH
09.01.17 1:00 AM ET
In 2001, I made a documentary film for German TV about the man who called himself “The Toughest Sheriff in America.” Ten years after I witnessed Joe Arpaio in action, a judge ordered him to stop detaining people based solely on racial profiling. Yet Arpaio continued to flout the law, and he faced up to six months in prison for criminal contempt of law. Before Arpaio was sentenced, President Trump pardoned him.
When I proposed the Arpaio documentary to my German clients, they were skeptical. They had trouble believing that his kind of law-enforcement abuse was really happening, and, if so, they weren’t confident I would able to capture it on camera. In the end, my clients were intrigued enough, because deep in the German unconscious there is still the image of the U.S. as the Wild West, a place where the toughest guy with the fastest gun will determine what Law and Order means. Sheriff Joe represented the essence of the evil cliché Germans remember from these fictional old Westerns. In my film, Arpaio even compared himself to these old movies, saying if he would ever have to retire, he would not exactly vanish by riding into the sunset, but he would vanish because he wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
There was no problem getting the man to cooperate. He craved the spotlight and behaved obnoxiously to satisfy the camera. Despite his cooperation, the filming became more difficult by the day because my crew developed such disgust and hatred for the man that I feared they would turn violent. We all started to feel dirty because we realized in some sick way we were feeding his oversized ego.
When I told Arpaio I needed a good beginning for my film, some kind of “bang,” he took it literally. He owned a tank he liked to ride in parades, and while we were filming in the courtyard of the jail, the tank appeared and fired its cannon. It was indeed a very loud “bang.”
Already back then Arpaio was in legal trouble. He had a website with a live feed showing people getting booked. The website came with a warning that one might witness violence or even sexually explicit content, which of course drew many viewers.
Surveillance cameras also captured unruly detainees getting strapped into a chair and then tortured with stun guns. One inmate, Scott Norberg, died in the restraining chair. The Phoenix New Times compared the video material to watching a snuff film.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/when-i-filmed-sheriff-joe-arpaio-he-was-cooperative-and-horrifying
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