Megan Cassidy

The Republic | azcentral.com

The former Maricopa County Sheriff's Office deputy who hoarded IDs, driver's licenses, torn-up citations and drugs in his home had also apparently recorded thousands of his own traffic stops, attorneys confirmed Friday.

The tapes could have far-reaching repercussions because they not only reportedly document misconduct on the part of now-deceased Ramon "Charley" Armendariz, but also signal that the Sheriff's Office did not turn over all traffic-stop data as was required in a recent racial-profiling lawsuit, according to plaintiffs' attorney Dan Pochoda of the American Civil Liberties Union.

ACLU and Sheriff's Office attorneys, along with Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Chief Deputy Jerry Sheridan, attended a sealed hearing on Wednesday with U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow to discuss the tapes' implications.

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Snow lifted the seal during a phone conference Friday, Pochoda said.

The traffic stops were recorded on dashboard and eyeglass cameras and contain more than 900 hours of footage of between 2,500 and 5,000 traffic stops, Pochoda said.

"It's so bizarre and so voluminous," he said.

Sheriff's deputies found the tapes in a search of Armendariz's home following his suicide on May 8. He had been engaged in a series of standoffs with law enforcement in the days leading to his death. Items found indicated that Armendariz was failing to process evidence, and potentially jeopardizing cases, for the past seven years, according to court records.

Recorded evidence would have been required to be turned over during the discovery phase of the racial-profiling trial, Pochoda said.

The tapes document potential civil-rights violations that could have even further bolstered Snow's findings that deputies used race in making law-enforcement decisions, he said.

Pochoda said Snow has ordered that the Sheriff's Office investigate who else in the agency had recording devices. Snow additionally ordered that the Sheriff's Office turn over all materials to the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona John Leonardo and County Attorney Bill Montgomery.

Armendariz was among a handful of sheriff's deputies to testify during the racial-profiling trial in 2012, in which Snow gave each side 20 hours to present its case.

Armendariz testified about his role in one of the traffic stops that was originally included in the lawsuit before it expanded to include every Latino driver that deputies stopped between 2007 and 2012.

He also told the court about his record on traffic stops that, in Snow's opinion, included a remarkable number of arrests and detentions of undocumented immigrants.

When Snow ruled that the Sheriff's Office had engaged in racial profiling, he drew from Armendariz's testimony to bolster his point that deputies were not adhering to the agency's "zero tolerance" policy for all moving violations during the sheriff's "saturation patrols."

The patrols were ostensibly about traffic enforcement, but many critics of the Sheriff's Office came to view them as a way for the agency to target Hispanic drivers under the assumption that many were undocumented.

In one April 2009 patrol, Armendariz arrested 12 people, 11 who had Hispanic surnames and 10 who were suspected of being in the country illegally, Snow wrote in his May 2013 ruling.

"The Court concludes that Deputy Armendariz considered race as one factor among others in making law enforcement decisions during both large- and small-scale saturation patrols," Snow wrote.

As part of the efforts to remedy the discrimination Snow found, the court appointed a monitor and made a series of other requirements, including the addition of cameras in patrol cars.

Defense attorney Thomas Liddy said the monitor would review all of Armendariz's recorded stops to determine how many might have been "problematic." But Liddy also doubted that Armendariz, a Hispanic officer and member of the sheriff's human-smuggling unit, would discriminate against Latino drivers, despite Snow's findings.