When one scans the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office’s website, one finds a wealth of information—generally about the most recent appearance Sheriff Paul Babeu has made on national television (see the CNN video embedded on the site’s front page, for an example).
When one then checks the About PCSO page, just below Smilin’ Paul’s face, they find this:
Interestingly enough, if one were to head to PinalSheriff.com, they’d find this:
That’s odd. It seems that the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office is advertising a site that is nothing but a domain-name landing page—surely this is just an oversight on their part, right?
Well, a WHOIS search got us to the bottom of this: the owner is a Mr. William Conley, who purchased the domain back in 2009.
Conley doesn’t care that the Sheriff’s Office has used the domain name that he purchased — as far as he’s concerned, “it’s a non-issue.” He simply saw that the domain was available and snapped it up. If the county wants to take it up with him, they’re perfectly welcome to, he says.
A call to the Pinal Sheriff’s Office has yet to be returned.
Admittedly, this isn’t a big deal at all—I mean, people goof up on websites constantly.
But it’s interesting to note that no one at the Pinal Sheriff’s Office bothered to look into a domain name that’s been controlled by the same person since 2009 before pasting it up on their website…or, if they’ve had that image up prior to August 2009, that they haven’t bothered to see if the domain was available since.
This article appears in Jan 3-9, 2013.
They’ve just got the wrong site. They have always been on http://pinalcountyaz.gov/departments/sheri…. The county maintains the site, not the Sheriff. They didn’t proof read their site.
Idiots the lot of them.
Seriously? I mean….really? Someone took the time to write about this? lol…who cares?
Nobody missed the ” have”?! Hahaha
Wow! that IS “hard hitting news!”
that is not a landing page it is a parked page.. that means the site is either being built, being rebuilt or has just changed hosting providers .. it is not sinister and it certainly is not a story
None of the current PR material for Babeu shows up on the PCSO website. Press releases about Babeu political ramblings are regularly shown at “SheriffPaul.com.”
Babeu has recently opined nationally about guns in schools and wrongfully cited there being “20,000 laws on the books” controlling guns. News reports of his interviews as sheriff are posted by him or his lackey Gaffney at SheriffPaul.com and not on the PCSO site.
SheriffPaul.com is and has been the re-election site for Babeu. Strange that his staff doesn’t post on the official sheriff’s office site.
That certainly looks like a landing page loaded with affiliate links all over it. Glad to see somebody making some money off of those incompetent fools.
I am so laughing so hard, I can’t stop. Only in Tucson…yawn!
Phoenix New Times had an interesting story last month which laid out how Babeau stuck it to the taxpayers by creating an unnecessary search and rescue unit, apparently because he wasn’t getting enough credit from the existing volunteer group.