CONSERVATIVE voters have much at stake in this November’s general elections, but few feel this as keenly as the members of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Posse. The posse is a 1,000-strong force of volunteers who buy their own police uniforms, guns and, in some cases, their own marked patrol cars. For more than 20 years members have served as unpaid auxiliaries for Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a law-and-order showman who styles himself “America’s toughest sheriff”.

Mr Arpaio, a gruff 84-year-old, won election as sheriff of Maricopa County—a sprawling, sun-baked tract of Arizona that includes the city of Phoenix and is home to nearly 4m people—in 1992, cruising to re-election five times. He is a frequent guest on conservative television and talk radio, earning fame for housing county prisoners in a “tent city” where temperatures have been known to reach 145F (63ºC), for making inmates wear pink underwear and feeding them meals whose average cost is between 15 and 40 cents, and for establishing what he boasts are the “world’s first-ever female and juvenile chain gangs”.

Critics single him out for other reasons, notably federal court rulings finding that he ordered his deputies to conduct immigration sweeps and raids that unlawfully targeted people who appeared to be non-white or Hispanic. Mr Arpaio, a Republican, is running for re-election this November, and—unusually—has fallen behind his Democratic challenger in some opinion polls. His woes may not end on election day. A federal judge has recommended that the sheriff be prosecuted for criminal contempt for defying court orders to stop racially biased policing: charges that could conceivably end in jail time.

The ripples from this turbulence have reached the men and women of the sheriff’s posse. These helpers are as much a part of Mr Arpaio’s brand as his tents and chain gangs. Though the force dates back to Arizona’s rural past, when locals would turn out to help the sheriff find lost travellers or hunt down scofflaws on horseback, Mr Arpaio is proud of expanding it into what he calls America’s largest volunteer posse. In 2011 the sheriff assigned a five-member “cold-case posse”, funded by donations from conservatives across the country, to investigate whether President Barack Obama faked evidence of his birth in America. Mr Arpaio announced his conclusion the following year: that a birth certificate released by the White House was a “computer-generated forgery”. In early 2013, shortly after a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Connecticut, Mr Arpaio dispatched armed posse members to guard schools and invited Steven Seagal, an actor in action films, to help train them.

John Pawloski is the grandfatherly, silver-moustachoied commander of a nine-member posse in Dreamland Villa, a no-frills retirement community dating back to the 1950s, comprising some 3,100 bungalows built around a community club, swimming pools and shuffleboard courts, near the city of Mesa. Mr Pawloski moved to Arizona from Buffalo, New York, after 32 years as a fireman. The volunteer, who will turn 70 at his next birthday, spends about six or seven hours a week on patrol and another ten hours on “office work”. He notes that people of his age “don’t believe in a slap on the hand for beating someone up” nor do they believe that drug addiction means “you can do what you like.”

Mr Pawloski’s neighbours, who include retirees from the northeast, the Midwest and Canadian “snowbirds” who spend winters in Arizona, are not wealthy folk. But each year they dig deep for a fund-raising drive, whether buying new police radios at $6,000 a time, or a gleaming black and gold patrol car (the newest of the posse’s three vehicles cost $40,000). Four of the posse’s members live in Dreamland Villa, a quiet spot on a weekday afternoon, disturbed only by the thrum of a thousand air-conditioning units, and the purring of a lone golf cart carrying an old man in swimming trunks, still wet from the pool. Yet in his trim office, with its map of crime statistics on the wall, Mr Pawloski sees threats. Old people are trusting, he says and, to “the crooks”, communities like his resemble “a nice, ripe apple” for the picking. The commander wears a beige uniform, identical to that of a sheriff’s deputy except for his badge, a six-pointed badge bearing the sheriff’s crest and the word “Posse”.

Mr Pawloski is not a swaggering vigilante-type. A typical patrol might involve checking on empty houses whose owners are away, directing traffic after an accident, offering water or a lift to an old person walking in the sun (people with dementia often wander), consoling a crime-victim whose cash was nabbed from a purse left by an open door, or quizzing homeless people loitering on a local nature trail. Holidays can be busy: Mr Pawloski cites the Christmas-time theft of an inflatable camel from a bungalow porch. Citing his age and a bad hip, he does not carry a gun, and is at pains to note that he is not a sworn police officer but a civilian, who only has authority when a sheriff’s deputy asks him to help.

Other commanders are more gung-ho. David Isho runs the Desert Foothills Sheriff’s Posse, which has 16 members. He is a Qualified Armed Posseman (QAP), carrying a gun after special training topped up with an annual test at the sheriff’s range, and drives his own marked patrol car (he bought it second-hand for $4,000). Mr Isho, 57, runs a company that makes gadgets for “preppers”, as survivalists preparing for the possible collapse of Western civilisation are known, but still devotes 300 hours a month to the posse, mostly patrolling by night. Locals are very keen on Mr Arpaio, he says, and “see us as an extension of Joe.”

The Carefree patrol

The Desert Foothills posse used to be twice as large, sighs Mr Isho, who moved to Arizona from Maryland. Several members left rather than undergo court-ordered training on making lawful stops and arrests—mandated for all sheriff’s deputies and posse members after Mr Arpaio lost his racial-profiling case. The training was time-consuming, he says. Asked if some posse members simply disagreed with the court ruling, Mr Isho calls that possible, too, growling that the Obama government has pursued an “agenda” against Mr Arpaio. He expresses disbelief at claims of racial profiling by the sheriff’s department during traffic patrols. In broiling-hot Arizona, Mr Isho scoffs, drivers favour such dark-tinted windows that “you can’t tell who is in a car or not.”

Mr Isho’s patch includes such affluent towns as Carefree, which are, he says, “very safe”. He works hard to make himself useful. His posse volunteers to transport prisoners to the county jail. It has helped deputies check ID cards at parties full of teenage drinkers. He recalls times when he has had to draw his gun, as when helping to check on an empty house by night, as a burglar alarm wailed. Still, there are limits. Not all professional deputies are “posse-friendly”, he concedes. So-called “self-activating”—as when a posse member drives a patrol car with lights flashing and siren wailing, without direct orders to do so from a sheriff’s deputy—is a serious no-no, which can see volunteers “booted” from the posse.

The looming elections worry Mr Isho. Though he believes the posse system would survive a change of sheriff, he fears that a new boss might reduce the volunteers’ powers, “castrating the programme”, as he puts it with some vehemence. The next sheriff might not feel that civilian volunteers should carry guns, and Mr Isho, for one, would not put on the uniform if he were not armed. A police uniform is a “magnet for trouble”, he explains gravely.

Encountered at the headquarters of the Arizona Republican Party in Phoenix, Mr Arpaio agrees that he has built up the role of the posse. He is proud of sending members out on raids to help catch criminals. “I don’t just send the posse out to rescue horses,” he says. As it happens, Paul Penzone, a veteran Phoenix police detective trying to unseat Mr Arpaio as sheriff, and therefore running as a (rather shy) Democrat, says that he is a “huge fan” of the posse, which he would not disarm. “This is Arizona. This is a state with a lot of gun-owners,” he notes tactfully.

Still, he would make changes. The posse does not reflect the diversity of the county, which is almost one-third Hispanic. He says he has too often seen the posse, in common with county chain gangs, deployed on high-visibility missions in the most affluent bits of the county, where Arpaio-voters are thickest on the ground. Mr Penzone would rather see extra patrols in public parks where children cannot play safely. Above all, he says: “I’m not going to send the posse to fly to Hawaii to investigate the president’s birth certificate.”