The Arizona Rangers Give Arizona 45,000 Free Hours a Year. Their Red and Blue Lights Come From a Funeral Escort Permit.

They buy their own guns, their own uniforms and their own gas. They stand in the sun at parades, county fairs and school events and don't get paid a dime. By the Arizona Rangers' own count, members logged 45,000 uniformed volunteer hours in 2025 and drove 811,000 miles in their own vehicles, which the organization puts at nearly $1.6 million in direct savings to taxpayers. That's more than 100 hours and close to 2,000 miles per Ranger.

In a state that is hundreds of officers short, that is not a hobby. That is public safety, delivered for free.

And the red and blue lights on their trucks? A spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Public Safety says those aren't there because the Rangers are law enforcement. They're there because the Rangers are registered as a funeral escort.

That one detail sums up the whole situation. Arizona leans on these volunteers, and then gives them almost nothing official to stand on.

The original Rangers were the genuine article. The territory created them in 1901 to clean up the lawless stretch before statehood, and in eight years 107 men made roughly 4,000 arrests, about a thousand of them for serious felonies. The Legislature disbanded them in 1909, mostly over politics and turf with local sheriffs.

In 1957, four of the original Rangers revived the name as a nonprofit. In 2002, Gov. Jane Dee Hull signed A.R.S. 41-4201, which recognized the modern group and spelled out exactly what it is: an unpaid, noncommissioned civilian auxiliary whose authority does not exceed that of any private citizen, working only at the request of, and under the direction of, actual law enforcement.

Sixty-nine years later, the volunteers are still showing up.

Inside that narrow legal box, the Rangers do a lot of good, and most of it never makes the news.

They assist local, state, federal and tribal agencies when asked, and they cover event security that small departments simply can't staff. In Tombstone, the local company helps the Marshal's Office with foot, bicycle and vehicle patrols and keeps a horseback unit for crowds and search and rescue. Rangers have helped with searches and evacuations, including at a Sahuarita high school.

The youth and family work is where they shine. Shop with a Cop. School supply drives. Explorers. Boys and Girls Clubs. Homeless Youth Connection. A crisis nursery shelter. St. Jude Children's Hospital. They support the families of fallen officers. When the Peoria company won a small corporate grant a few years back, the money went to three elementary schools.

Members commit to at least eight hours a month, attend monthly meetings, pay dues and buy their own gear. Nobody gets reimbursed.

And the escort work deserves its own sentence. Leading a family to a graveside, or bringing a veteran home with dignity, is some of the most honorable volunteer work there is. If the Rangers are using those lights to lead processions, good for them.

If you want to see what the Rangers look like with a real agency behind them, go to Globe.

About two weeks before the Sept. 26, 2025 flood, the Rangers contacted Globe Police about a possible partnership. Nothing had been signed when the water came. They called anyway, offered people, and showed up. They worked road closures and security details, and they stayed long after the first wave of the emergency. Chief Dale Walters later said the department had hoped for a couple of extra hands, and the Rangers "blew those expectations out of the water."

In November 2025, the Globe City Council voted unanimously to make it official with a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU-2026-0052). The agreement covers crime scene security, riding as a second person in patrol cars, critical incident response, foot patrols and traffic control. It costs the city nothing. It also draws a clear line: the Rangers can't exercise law enforcement authority unless sworn Globe officers direct and supervise them. Walters called them "a tremendous partner" whose downtown presence let his officers focus on emergencies.

In April, Globe Police gave the Rangers a Critical Incident Award for the flood response, and the Rangers gave the department an award back. This month, Rangers from the Phoenix and East Valley companies posted that they were on duty assisting Globe PD at the Apache Jii cultural event.

This is the model in miniature. A sworn agency sets the duties, a sworn officer is in charge, and the volunteers bring the hours. A small department gets a lot more coverage and pays nothing for it.

What Globe can't fix on its own is everything that happens outside its city limits. The MOU covers one police department. The lights, the vetting and the badge are still governed by state law, and that's where the gaps are.

Phoenix is authorized for 3,125 sworn officers. As of July it had 2,467, leaving the department more than 500 officers short, with fewer sworn officers than it had in 2024. Statewide, DPS has said it needs about 300 more troopers, and overnight highway coverage is still thin. The Governor's Office of Highway Safety reported that officers and deputies working traffic shifts over last year's holidays were down 41 percent. The Legislature spent part of this year on a bill to create a faster certification path for veterans and former military police, just to get more people in uniform.

Put the Rangers' numbers next to that. 45,000 uniformed hours a year is roughly the work of 22 full-time officers. Every parade route, school event and county fair a Ranger covers is a shift a sworn officer doesn't have to pull off patrol.

Here's where the paperwork stops matching the work.

Outside of police, fire and ambulances, one of the few legal routes to red and blue lights in Arizona is A.R.S. 28-776, the funeral and military escort law. The county sheriff registers escort vehicles, which must carry a red or red and blue light and a siren, and their drivers get emergency vehicle privileges while escorting a funeral or military procession.

That's the registration DPS pointed to. It lets a driver clear an intersection for a hearse. It does not make the truck a police car, and it gives the driver no special authority when there's no procession behind them.

Traffic is the clearest example. In Phoenix, city code makes the Police Department responsible for directing traffic, and state law requires drivers to obey an officer invested by law with authority to direct traffic. A Ranger in uniform and western hat waving cars through an intersection at a parade has no more legal standing than a bystander, unless a sworn officer has put him there and is directing him, the way Globe's MOU requires. A driver who ignores him isn't breaking any law. If somebody gets hurt, the volunteer is the one exposed.

Nobody standing on a sidewalk reads statutes. They see a uniform and western hat, a star badge, a sidearm and a truck with a star on the door and red and blue lights.

When the Rangers provided security at the 2021 Senate ballot audit, Phoenix New Times described them as indistinguishable from real police. A community paper's write-up of a Rangers talk at a Valley Rotary club reported that on certain duties the Rangers have full arrest authority. The statute says the opposite. A Ranger writing in a KTAR first-person feature called members sworn peacekeepers. Sworn to the organization, yes. Not sworn by the state.

When the public can't tell the difference, the volunteer standing there carries the risk. One person defers to a badge with no more legal power than a library card. Another decides to test it.

Then there's the seal. Under A.R.S. 41-130, nobody may use the Great Seal of Arizona, or anything resembling it, without a certificate of approval from the Secretary of State. The Rangers' insignia carries a likeness of the seal. The Inquirer filed a formal records request with the Secretary of State asking whether that approval was ever granted. That answer is still pending. The Yavapai County Attorney's Office, asked for any records on Rangers seal use, closed its request without producing any.

If you want to stand at a door in a uniform with a gun as a security guard in Arizona, DPS wants your fingerprints. The guard licensing law runs every applicant through a fingerprint-based state and FBI criminal history check and lets anyone look up a guard's license online.

The Arizona Rangers are specifically exempt from all of it under A.R.S. 32-2606.

The Rangers say they fill the gap themselves. Their materials say every member undergoes a state and national background check, must hold an Arizona concealed weapon permit, and completes the Arizona Ranger Training Academy, with firearms qualification to AZPOST standards. That's real training, and it's more than many volunteer groups ask.

But a "state and national background check" is not an FBI fingerprint check, which a private nonprofit generally can't run on its own. The Rangers don't say which kind they use. And because they're a private nonprofit, Arizona's public records law doesn't reach them. A citizen who wants to know who was on duty at an event, what training they had or what complaints exist can ask the agency that requested them, if one did, or read the IRS Form 990. That's about it.

The vetting may be solid. Nobody outside the organization can check.

The volunteers are steady. The leadership is not.

Corporation Commission filings show officer and director changes in eight of the last nine years, including five separate change filings in 2023 alone. As recently as March 2025, the filings listed Barry Adams as chairman. By the May 2026 annual report, three of four officer posts had new names: Chairman Joe McWilliams, Secretary Michael Droll and Treasurer Ron Burchett, with Director Lisa Penney the only carryover. In 2018 the directors dropped the Board of Governors made up of the elected company commanders.

In January, Sen. Mark Finchem and Sen. Wendy Rogers filed SB 1071 to repeal every Rangers statute and strip the security guard exemption, citing complaints about governance and reports that senior figures had inflated their law enforcement backgrounds. The Rangers' attorney, Jared Simmons, said an internal investigation cleared the officials and called the material false hearsay. The bill passed the Senate 17-11 and then died in the House Government Committee.

Even Finchem drew the line in the right place. "I love the Arizona Rangers," he told the California Globe, calling the rank-and-file dedication unquestionable.

On that, everyone agrees.

The Inquirer built this piece from Arizona statutes (A.R.S. 41-4201, 32-2606, 28-776 and 41-130), Corporation Commission filings, the City of Globe's MOU with the Rangers, the SB 1071 legislative record, DPS licensing rules, a statement from a DPS spokesperson on the funeral escort registration, conversations with rank-and-file Rangers, the Rangers' own published materials, and prior reporting by Axios Phoenix, the Arizona Silver Belt, the Globe-Miami Times, Phoenix New Times, the Arizona Daily Star, the California Globe and KTAR, plus Illinois and Colorado records for the opinion box. Service hours, miles and savings are the Rangers' own figures and could not be independently verified; the 22-officer equivalent is our estimate at 2,080 hours a year. We did not review member background files, which the organization does not publish. We contacted State Commander Col. Joe McWilliams, State Secretary Col. Mike Droll and attorney Jared Simmons, who had not responded by publication; we also contacted Sens. Finchem and Rogers, Reps. Walt Blackman and Pamela Carter, retired DPS and Phoenix police leaders, Globe Police, the Secretary of State's office and the Yavapai County Attorney. We want to hear from current and former Rangers, and from agencies that have used them, about vetting, vehicles and deployments. Tips: [email protected].