GOVERNMENT
It was his stint with Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, however, than landed Sloup on the Brady List. He had some unsavory things to say about his former employer after voters ousted the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio in the wake of losing more than a quarter-billion dollars in civil rights lawsuits. MCSO is under a federal monitorship because of that catastrophe, something Sloup calls “the biggest Ponzi scheme anyone has ever seen.” “Seeing the money they are sh*tting away… It’s a giant, federally mandated scam. It’s an abortion of the law,” he said. “The morale is terrible. The culture is terrible.” At PCSO, Sloup says he’s never been more fulfilled in his career. And he’s got the full support of the sheriff, who questions the authority of the Brady List. “So many agencies, out of pure spite, will put people on the Brady List,” Lamb said. “I did not agree with the termination that put him on that list. We gave him a chance because we could see the good things he did.”
beyond a justifiable return on investment. “There’s almost no budget for it,” Lamb explained. “It doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything.” THE BRADY BUNCH Once a bartender on Long Island, Sloup’s journey to internet stardom wasn’t without some choppy waters. For him, it’s a bit of a comeback story. Sloup left two other Arizona law enforcement agencies under less-than-stellar circumstances following internal affairs investigations into whether he tampered with a police report and broke a laptop computer and tried to cover it up, among other things. Sloup is on the Brady List, an index of
law enforcement officials with credibility and honesty issues who are barred from testifying in court. His former colleague at Scottsdale Police Department, Brandon Sullivan, is one of his most outspoken haters. “The tone and tenor of the videos alone irritated me,” Sullivan says of “Fridays with Frank.” “I worked around him, taking a few calls for service with him. I remember thinking that for a brand-new cop, he was an absolute f*cking jerk to every citizen and criminal he interacted with, regardless of their demeanor. I was relieved when he was fired, er, resigned.”
SR 347 IS ‘A RACEWAY’
Police Department and Arizona Department of Public Safety on State Route 347. For weeks, the coalition had people pulled over left and right all the way from Interstate 10 to city limits to make up for a lacking
police presence on one of the state’s most embattled and dangerous highways. “It’s a raceway out there,” Sloup said of SR 347. “I could go out there right now and get someone at a criminal amount of speed in a very short time.”
“Those legitimate death threats that come in go straight to the FBI and they get investigated,” Sloup said. “If you stand for anything, there are always going to be haters.” Someone out there wants to go down in history as “the guy who shot Frank,” he said. “As I get more and more popular, there’s a better chance someone will drive by and light rounds off at me.” But the threats don’t deter him. Fans and haters alike prove “Fridays with Frank” accomplishes its goal of giving Arizona’s third-most populous county an identity other than that place where you stop for In-N-Out Burger between Phoenix and Tucson. “It humanizes us, and it puts Pinal County on the map,” Sloup said. Sheriff Lamb agreed: “Not only is it beneficial for recruiting, which has been tough for law enforcement, but the county is more in the limelight. People constantly tell me they moved to Pinal County because they love what we do.” TICKET FARE You might think “Fridays with Frank” funnels a lot of cash into the county coffers. YouTube pays up to $29.30 per 1,000 views, according to Business Insider . That means the PCSO channel should stand to have earned as much as $7.7 million on the back of “Fridays with Frank.” But because the channel is tied to a government agency, none of the videos are monetizable. The channel hasn’t earned a penny from YouTube despite its explosive success. That could change soon, according to Salzwedel. “The agency is talking about trying to monetize because there’s potential there,” he said. “We are in the process of starting to jump through some hoops to see. At this point, are we doing a disservice to the taxpayers by not taking free money from YouTube?” The beauty of it all, though, is the show doesn’t cost anything to create. For PCSO, the recruiting and community relations benefits are “At this point, are we doing a disservice to the taxpayers by not taking free money from YouTube?” SAM SALZWEDEL
Last year, Pinal County Sheriff’s Deputy Frank Sloup worked a traffic detail in conjunction with Maricopa Police Department, Gila River
‘LEGIT CRIME IN MARICOPA’
Search for Moving Waldo on Google and the first result is a post on the social networking site Reddit, under the r/Scams subreddit. In a news release, the city said Moving Waldo was “a leading resource for relocation information.” Moving Waldo asserted per capita crime was higher in places like Fountain Hills and Paradise Valley than in Maricopa. There’s “not a chance” crime in those cities is higher than in Maricopa, Pinal County Sheriff’s Deputy Frank Sloup told InMaricopa in a recent interview. A traffic cop by day, Sloup moonlights as a sniper on a regional SWAT
and its own source plainly states the crime rate in Maricopa is 30% higher than in Paradise Valley, which isn’t even on Moving Waldo’s list of the five safest cities. Yes, some of those are towns, not cities — but despite Moving Waldo calling its list “safest cities” in Arizona, its own list includes Florence and Gilbert, which are towns. Heck, the Town of Gilbert is No. 1 on the list of “safest cities.” And the DPS data doesn’t even include places like Fountain Hills that don’t have their own police departments, making the
City Hall raved in February about its recent rank as Arizona’s second-safest city. But the city forgot to check its source, which turns out to be totally bogus. There are at least 28 safer places than Maricopa in Arizona, according to the same source used in that ranking — places like Queen Creek, Florence, Buckeye and even Tucson. The ranking came from Moving Waldo, a little- known moving broker that is not based in the U.S. and has no online reviews. The report said Maricopa was the safest city in Arizona after Gilbert, leading many residents to scratch their heads. InMaricopa in the last three months reported a murder, animals burned alive, a handful of shootings, kidnappings, drug dealers, hostage situations, murder threats and plenty more. Gilbert, meanwhile, has grappled with the Gilbert Goons street gang, tied to a murder and other violent crimes.
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list of cities safer than Maricopa even longer.
team alongside some officers from Maricopa
The Moving Waldo report says Florence has a crime rate of 90 per 1,000 people. That’s just a math fail — its own source states it’s just 9 per 1,000 people. That’s twice as safe as Maricopa, with a crime rate of about 20 per 1,000. Whoops. The report also says San Luis has a crime rate double Maricopa. But its crime rate is only half of Maricopa’s, according to the same DPS data.
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Police Department. He said MPD officers often remark at the prevalence of crime in Maricopa — and PCSO data shows Maricopa isn’t even the second-safest city in the county. “Maricopa is busy,” he said. “There’s legit crime in the city of Maricopa.” Moving Waldo cites the Arizona Department of Public Safety as a source —
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InMaricopa.com | April 2024
April 2024 | InMaricopa.com
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