It’s a mixed bag.

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Donald Trump’s pardon of ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio stands out in this list for several reasons. One is the timing (as David Frum explains here). With certain big exceptions—Ford’s pardon of Nixon one month into his term, Carter’s Vietnam pardon on his first day—presidents have generally waited until late in their term to issue pardons. Another was procedure. Although the final choice is of course the president’s, usually the Justice Department’s special pardons division prepares an advisory review of the merits of each case. This time Trump apparently just blasted ahead. Usually the recipient of a pardon has either begun serving time or has exhausted his or her appeals. (Not always—the Nixon pardon was to preempt any criminal proceedings before they might get started, and Caspar Weinberger had been indicted but had not yet gone to trial.) In this case, Joe Arpaio had been convicted, but appeals had not even begun.

But the main difference was the nature of Arpaio’s crime. While he is not the first official whose offense involved abuse of public powers—from Nixon on down, others fit that category—his is the first case I’m aware of where someone is pardoned for using state power toward racist ends.

That description of Arpaio’s crime may sound tendentious, but it’s what his conviction amounts to. For details, I very highly recommend a Twitter chronicle put out last night by Phoenix New Times, which has been covering Arpaio for two decades. Over at least the past decade, state and federal judges—most of the latter appointed by George W. Bush—have been criticizing Arpaio and his practices, and warning that they violate a range of anti-discrimination laws. In 2008, one Bush-appointed federal judge, Neil Wake, ruled in favor of the ACLU, which had claimed that Arpaio’s jailing practices were unconstitutional and abusive. Another Bush appointee, federal judge G. Murray Snow, ordered Arpaio to cease-and-desist racial profiling practices, and referred him for criminal prosecution when he refused to obey. In the Phoenix New Times account you’ll see links to a lot more.

This was Arpaio’s practice. It’s among the reasons that the voters of Maricopa County turned him out by more than a 12-point margin last fall, in the same election where they voted for Donald Trump by a margin of four points. And it is what Donald Trump has called “just doing his job” and has pardoned Arpaio for.

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The pardon is damaging for both immediate and longer-term reasons. The immediate significance is that the United States is in the middle of disputes for which Joe Arpaio is a precise and destructive symbol. Across the country, police units are under scrutiny, or are avoiding it, for their use of deadly force on civilians, and the fairness with which they use it on white- and non-white subjects. Across the country, Latino groups in particular are on the alert for raids and excesses by newly energized local law-enforcement agencies and federal immigration officials. At just this moment, Donald Trump has chosen to pardon a man convicted of violations on both fronts: The units he commanded were needlessly violent and abusive toward civilians, and they based too many of their decisions about the use of force on the subject’s race.