Last Saturday night, three members of the Minutemen, an Arizona border militia, went out on a patrol east of the Maricopa County town of Gila Bend. So did deputies with Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio's office, but neither party expected to come across one another in the middle of the Gila Bend desert. That almost ended poorly for both of them: 49-year-old Richard Malley, a militia member, was arrested for allegedly pointing a rifle at a deputy he mistook for a drug smuggler. In response to the incident, Sheriff Joe Arpaio said in a typically blunt message to militia members on Tuesday that there would be "chaos if you're going to have private citizens dressed just like our deputies taking the law into their own hands."
According to a local Arizona ABC station, deputies pulled up in their vehicle, flashed their headlights and honked their horn - a tactic meant to fool drug traffickers into thinking their connect has arrived - when they spotted fresh tracks in the desert sand. When they started to follow them, Malley and his two fellow militia members emerged out of the darkness, yelling commands; Malley also pointed his rifle and shone a flashlight on one of the deputies, and continued to aim at him even after the deputy identified himself as law enforcement. "I have to commend my deputy for not killing this person, which easily could have happened," Arpaio said, according to the Associated Press. "He's lucky he didn't see 30 rounds fired into him...If they continue this there could be some dead militia out there."
Court papers say that Malley told the deputy he didn't carry identification with him when he went out on patrols so that drug cartel members whom he might encounter couldn't learn his identity. The deputy then showed Malley his patches, badge and the word "sheriff" across his chest, and asked him to surrender his weapon. Malley refused. "You aren't taking my weapons," he told the deputy.
Malley was booked into a Maricopa County jail for aggravated assault, according to the ABC affiliate. He was released on $10,000 bail and will see a court appearance on August 26. The Associated Press notes that in Malley's probable cause statement, he claims "he had the right to point his rifle at the individual because he had reasonable suspicion to believe a crime was occurring."
The Minutemen and other border-patrol militias have been in decline in recent years after they saw a surge of membership in the early 2000s. Sheriff Arpaio's county doesn't share a border with Mexico, but a large swath of it consists of desert, which sees a considerable amount of smuggling, both of drugs and of humans.
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