It's a little after four in the afternoon, and I’m standing in the blazing heat, in a parking lot at the Northwest corner of 32nd Street and Thomas in Phoenix. Most of the parking lot is roped off with yellow police tape, a dramatic move by perhaps the most dramatic sheriff in American history. Inside the taped area are deputies. Lots of deputies. Lots of sunglasses. And big, big trucks housing mobile jail cells. Lots of TV news crews. Lots of hatred. Ah, Arizona, how do I love thee? Let me count the deputays.

I am here as an editor, as a reporter, and as a citizen observer. But I don’t go inside the roped off area with most of the other reporters. They’re here from all the TV stations, from the newspapers. Sheriff Joe Arpaio farts in Phoenix, and many in the corporate media here come running to celebrate it against a backdrop of American flags and tough-guy scowling. There has never been a more lauded scoundrel than this, I think. Question is: Will they celebrate this day as well? After all, Arpaio is here today, on Good Friday, to tell the people of Maricopa County that he has begun another weekend of “patrols” in predominantly Latino neighborhoods. For Easter Weekend. The last time he did this, it was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Nice timing, from a man who bragged on CNN that he found being compared to the KKK to be a compliment. Ah, Arizona.

In Arpaio-speak, this "patrol" thing means claiming that crime is up in the neighborhood, when, in fact, it is down. It means claiming that people in the neighborhood have called his offices to ask for more patrols, when in fact no one I talked to in the neighborhood has anything but fear and loathing for the sheriff. It means arresting people for minor offenses, such as a cracked windshield or mild speeding, offenses that in Scottsdale or Cave Creek would get the offender a ticket at the most.

It is Good Friday, and Sheriff Joe has decided this is the perfect time to terrorize Latinos for a weekend. Easter weekend. He has hundreds of deputies all over the neighborhood, along with armed members of a volunteer “posse”. I see one such volunteer stride past, in a shirt that reads “GOD’S ARMY,” his pistol in full view. He is tall and stiff as an SS soldier, a stick lodged somewhere quiet high up his rectum. He sneers at me and all the people who stand with me, most of us brown, almost all of us Latino. Because I am a wiseass, I cannot resist.