On Monday, Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone announced he will not seek a third term and will vacate his office a year early, in January 2024.
“I think you always have to have the plan to go in and make as much impact as you can in a period of time that is appropriate and clear the way for someone else to come in and improve on that,” said Penzone at his press conference. “So I will not be pursuing a third term. As a matter of fact, I think it would be appropriate to depart from the office in January and clear the way so that during the last year of my term going into the election there aren’t distractions.”
Penzone was first elected in 2016, defeating the well-known incumbent Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
While he had campaigned on improving public safety, Penzone’s first term was largely occupied with dismantling as many of the Sheriff Department’s programs, leading to diminished morale and staffing shortages. He immediately dismantled the department’s Tent City, an outdoors housing unit for inmates. In 2017 he disbanded the department’s drug interdiction unit that had helped dramatically reduce drug trafficking in southern Maricopa County. As expected, drug smuggling rapidly increased with the decrease in law enforcement presence. He eliminated the special team the department had that dealt with animal cruelty, oversaw a dramatic increase in internal affairs investigations, and stood by while the department ended up with critical staffing shortages.
Under Penzone, the County Jail became substantially more dangerous, as inmates were murdered and drug trafficking spiked. As a sign of how pervasive and corrupting this drug culture was, Penzone held a press conference in January announcing that he was taking steps to secure the jails after a detention officer at the Lower Buckeye Jail was arrested for attempting to smuggle pills into the facility.
“Penzone was never up to the job,” lamented one insider with knowledge of the department’s struggles, “and maybe to his credit he finally realized it and is getting out? It is incredibly sad to see the damage he has done to that department.”
The County Board of Supervisors will select a replacement for Penzone once his retirement is official next January. By law, the replacement must be a Democrat like Penzone, although finding a quality replacement may be extra challenging. Whoever steps into the job will inherit all of Penzone’s legal problems, including lawsuits remaining from Arpaio’s days, that Penzone has still not resolved to the satisfaction of the courts.