Word: phoenixes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Atkinson is a former marine, and the well-groomed north side of Phoenix was too quiet for him. Three years ago, he asked for a transfer to Maryvale, where the action is. No white-haired Sansabelts in golf carts here. Drugs rule; gang bangers shoot each other out of boredom; and third-generation Mexican Americans join Anglos in grumbling about the illegals who pour across the border four hours to the south and come here to live, 10 and 20 to a house...
...pull the car over. The Lincoln speeds up, and Atkinson goes to his lights and siren. His next radio transmission is one word--bailout; it quickens the pulse of every cop who hears it. Across the west side, squad cars bearing the raised-wing symbol of the mythic Phoenix change direction like birds in flight...
...York City. Racial profiling in New Jersey. Quick trigger fingers in Chicago, where two unarmed black motorists were killed by police in separate incidents on a single day earlier this month. Judging by the national headlines, it is a season of cops gone mad. The story in Phoenix is different, but it is part of the same drama--the constantly stressed marriage between mostly white police forces and the minorities they work with, who are at once disproportionately the victims of crime and its perpetrators. The great majority of hardworking, law-abiding minority residents need the police for protection, just...
...Phoenix has had its share of both. Last year the city paid $5.3 million to the family of a black 25-year-old who died as the result of a neck hold during a 1994 altercation with police; he was a double amputee whose prosthetic legs came off during the struggle. And a civil trial awaits in the 1996 police killing of a 16-year-old Hispanic, shot 25 times while armed with a butcher knife...
...Phoenix businessman Alfredo Gutierrez, a former state senator, makes poetry of the west side's Los Angelized sprawl. "It's a place with no edges. It bleeds in and out of industrial and residential developments, and there's a creeping invisibility--an anonymity." The weak sense of community makes the area all the harder to police. And there is ethnic fragmentation as long-established Hispanics see new Mexican immigrants moving in next door, calling south of the border for the relatives and parking the truck on the sidewalk...