My wife was on Sheriiff Joe Arpaio’s Posse for about 5 years. Technically, she was an unreimbursed employee of Maricopa County. As a member of the Posse, she did a lot of traffic patrol, school monitoring, and anything else that Sheriff Joe needed extra help with.
Because she was on the Posse, she was allowed to own a squad car for use when she was on duty. She found this car which had been owned by a prior Posse member and we bought it. She would use it whenever she was on duty, so it got a bit of use.
The rest of the time, it sat in front of our collection garage. I always considered it to be part of my security system. I figured that nobody in their right mind would break into a house that had a cop car in front of it.
One funny story she had was when she was being trained for traffic control. They went out to Sun City (a retirement community near Phoenix) where they turned off traffic lights at intersections so the Posse member could learn how to direct traffic. Residents would show up with their lawn chairs to watch. There’s a lot of golf carts in the community, so it was a mixture of cars, bikes, golf carts, etc. It was pretty much a disaster. When the Posse members would hold up their hands and blow their whistles to stop traffic, the traffic wouldn’t stop – they’d just wave as they ran through the intersection completely oblivious to what was going on.
