Judge keeps Maricopa sheriff’s office under oversight in profiling case
A federal judge has rejected Maricopa County’s request to end court oversight of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, keeping the agency under supervision in a long-running racial-profiling case.
U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow signed a 72-page order on September 10 in Melendres v. Arpaio. He denied the defendants’ motion for relief under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b), without prejudice, finding that they had not shown that the court-ordered reforms were complete, durable and sufficient to prevent future violations.
The ruling does not permanently bar changes to the oversight orders. Snow directed the parties to submit a joint notice within 60 days addressing whether some provisions can be modified, terminated or made inactive.
Judge questioned how traffic stops were analyzed
A central issue was the sheriff’s office’s analysis of traffic-stop duration. MCSO marked 10,194 of 20,265 traffic stops as involving an extended-traffic-stop indicator in 2024, or 50.30% of all stops. In 2025, it marked 13,631 of 24,647 stops that way, or 55.30%.
Snow wrote that excluding those stops removed a majority of the agency’s stops from the duration analysis. He also noted that the excluded group contained the longest stops, raising questions about whether the remaining data could reliably show that racial disparities had been eliminated.
The judge distinguished those agency reports from an analysis by an expert for the plaintiffs. Reviewing 38,897 stops from 2023 and 2024, the expert found that stops involving Hispanic drivers lasted 4.7 minutes longer than stops involving white drivers after applying statistical controls.
That 4.7-minute figure is an expert finding cited in the order, not a ruling that every stop involving a Hispanic driver was unlawfully prolonged. The court’s concern was methodological: analyses that remove most extended stops may produce a different picture from an analysis that includes all stops. The order did not find that every extended-stop indicator was improperly recorded.
What the oversight covers
The federal supervision concerns court orders governing the sheriff’s office’s traffic-stop practices, documentation, training, complaint handling, internal-affairs procedures and monitoring.
The orders followed findings in the civil-rights litigation that MCSO had used race or Latino ancestry in policing decisions and had unlawfully prolonged some detentions while immigration status was being checked. The court later imposed supplemental requirements involving training, stop documentation, complaint tracking, internal-affairs investigations and independent monitoring.
The latest ruling addresses whether the defendants have met the legal burden to show that the objectives of those orders have been achieved and that future violations are unlikely to recur. It does not impose a new statewide policing rule or determine that every current MCSO practice violates the Constitution.
Responses and next steps
Maricopa County criticized the decision and signaled that it may appeal. The sheriff’s office has maintained that it implemented durable remedies and that the remaining oversight should end. Those positions are responses to the ruling; Snow did not accept them as proof that the court’s requirements had been satisfied.
For now, federal oversight continues. The next concrete step is a joint notice due within 60 days discussing whether parts of the orders can be severed, modified or made inactive. The court could later schedule a status conference or additional hearings.
County residents, civil-rights plaintiffs and public-safety officials will have to watch for that joint filing, any appeal docket entry and further court action. The case also illustrates a broader accountability issue: showing that reforms exist on paper may not be enough when an agency must demonstrate, through complete and reliable data, that the changes are working and likely to last.
Sources
- September 10 federal court order in Melendres v. Arpaio
- Associated Press report on continued court supervision
- U.S. Justice Department case materials
Look for updates to this story
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