Acquitted Chandler cop lashes out at Arpaio

It seems almost ironic now, but at one time Chandler police Sgt. Tom Lovejoy was an avid supporter, even a defender, of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Lovejoy remembers a point in February 2007 during a conference of police officers in Las Vegas when he heard some fellow police talking trash about the sheriff.

"I was a little bit irritated about that," Lovejoy now recalls, "to the point where I actually defended him to those people."

Since then, things have changed radically.

Chandler cop acquitted in animal cruelty case

The way Lovejoy described it in an exclusive Tribune interview this week, his interactions with the sheriff's office led him into a modern heart of darkness in the past year, in which he has seen the worst side of Valley law enforcement.

It wasn't so much that sheriff's deputies arrested and investigated him on suspicion of animal cruelty in the death of his police dog, he said.

It was the way the sheriff and his publicity team handled the whole thing - holding a national news conference on the arrest, publicly disgracing the veteran sergeant and stonewalling his defense team on information nearly every step of the way.

"It's a dark place inside the sheriff's office," said Lovejoy, who was acquitted Friday on a lone misdemeanor charge that resulted from it all.

At times, Lovejoy's defense team had to rely on secret sources inside the sheriff's office to get simple reports and documents the agency was withholding, he said.

"The information that we got was almost like clandestine meetings in the middle of a dark alley in Phoenix in the middle of the night," he said. The people who gave them some of the most useful information, "were afraid they were going to lose their jobs."

In a half-hour interview at Lovejoy's house in a county island near Gilbert, the sergeant and his wife, Carolynn, talked about the past year of their lives, their troubles with the sheriff's office and the steps they hope to take next.

The interview intentionally avoided the details of Aug. 11, 2007, the day Lovejoy forgot his K-9 partner Bandit, a 5-year-old Belgian Malinois, inside a police vehicle for nearly 13 hours, killing Bandit.

Those events are already documented through media reports, public records and in court testimony from the daylong trial.

Instead, the questions mostly focused on what Lovejoy's family experienced throughout the ordeal.

The whole thing showed Lovejoy something he never expected to find, he said, "I was quite shocked at the level of corruption that is inside that department."

For its part, the sheriff's office called Lovejoy's allegations of corruption, hypocrisy, and his contention of stonewalling, "ludicrous."

"This agency fully cooperated with the court and Lovejoy's attorney," sheriff's spokesman Capt. Paul Chagolla wrote in an e-mail. "We are proud of our investigation and our policies against animal abuse & neglect, and we have no intention of changing our stance."

However, Lovejoy said he's looking at a way of breaking down that resolve.

Minutes after he was acquitted, he told a gaggle of reporters that Arpaio needed to be held accountable for the highly-publicized investigation and arrest.

In the interview, he said that means he is considering bringing a lawsuit against the sheriff's office.

"I'm not one to make a quick decision ... until we can really understand everything that's happened," Lovejoy said. "This is so fresh, we need to make sure that we're making the right decisions."

During the yearlong case, Lovejoy remained on the Chandler force as a sergeant, though he was removed from the K-9 unit and put on the graveyard shift in patrol.

He said the experience has changed the way he looks at police work and suspects on the street.

On traffic stops and interactions with the public, he said, the thought of being a defendant for a year is fresh on his mind.

"I certainly got an education of what it's like to be in the defendant's seat," he said, "and a little bit of what a defendant's feeling."

With the trial over, Lovejoy is finally able to speak about his case. Before that, he always had to rely on his wife to speak for him in public.

Carolynn Lovejoy said she was merely trying to correct the record whenever she saw a mistake or lie in the media.

The situation was "already devastating with the truth," she said. "And when people start putting lies on top of it to make it worse ... that's when I started having an issue."

The couple noticed a distinct change in the media coverage when Carolynn started talking to the press, they said. The coverage shed a more human light on the tragedy.

To this day, Lovejoy said he still believes he was targeted so the sheriff could earn publicity.

"That's dangerous when you have a sheriff that only enforces the law for people that are going to get him some votes," Lovejoy said.

Carolynn Lovejoy added, "That was all for show. That was just the big Joe show."