Thread: Phoenix's woes grow with city

http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_4876897

Phoenix's woes grow with city
Once considered a model for growth, the nation s fifth-largest city has become a hotbed for drugs and gangs, longtime residents say they are feeling trapped.
By Michael Riley
Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 12/21/2006 07:37:43 PM MST


It's 11 a.m. and this is the only way - a pistol at hand - that the 60-year-old retiree will go down this alley, 200 feet from his front door in the west Phoenix neighborhood of Maryvale.

He points to a spot in his condominium's parking lot where there was a double homicide last year. Just a few months ago, he said, managers found a prostitute working out of an abandoned laundry room near the condo's pool.

In all, there have been 68 recent arrests at his complex, according to a police nuisance order that catalogs 253 criminal incidents ranging from drug possession to child molestation. In a city where crime is rising and traffic jams start at 3 p.m., Phoenix is the former upstart struggling with its new role as a major American metropolis.

Having grown by nearly 500,000 people since 1990 to become America's fifth-largest city, Phoenix is strapped with a crime rate that, according to FBI statistics, now tops that of New York, Los Angeles or Baltimore.

Phoenix "has grown too much too fast with no proper planning," said Biddle, a former commercial pilot, furious at the decline of a once-quiet neighborhood.

The city's boosters have always thought of it as a model for the new American city.

"Our success has been that we are a melting pot," said Mayor Phil Gordon, originally from Chicago.

"We may be only a 60-year-old city, but that's also been our success," he said. "It's new people and new thinking. That's tough in other cities."

A mere speck of a farm town with a population of about 5,500 people in 1900, Phoenix took off with a surge of midcentury growth driven by the expansion of Cold War military bases, then again as a center of cheap real estate during the housing boom of the past 10 years.

Welcoming to newcomers

Pat Gober, an Arizona State University professor who's written a book on the city, says the thing Phoenix has always prized about itself - an openness to newcomers who come seeking something better - may also now work against it.

"Two-thirds of the (city's) population was born outside the state, and most of the remaining third are children," said Gober, including a recent surge of the foreign-born population, mostly immigrants from Mexico.

"The vast majority of people in Phoenix have had their life-defining experiences - the first prom, the visit to a downtown restaurant, the first trip to the ballpark - someplace else. They experienced those in Baltimore or Chicago or Kansas City.

"All the migration, the recent growth, the social fragmentation. It creates the background in which these crime rates appear."

Phoenicians - now nearly 1.5 million strong - are spread across a sometimes unwieldy city of 550 square miles, an area larger than Los Angeles. It sits at the center of a crescent-shaped metro area of 3.8 million bursting at the seams. Development recently jumped a natural boundary of mountains to the west, opening up a vast stretch of desert for new growth.

The metro area can boast booming employment, modern infrastructure and a new $455 million football stadium.

Even so, in a recent poll by ASU's Morrison Institute for Public Policy, 40 percent of residents said they would leave Phoenix tomorrow if they could.

Anonymity lures gangs

As it grew, Phoenix followed the pattern of other Southwestern cities, using the state's powerful annexation laws to swallow its neighbors.

"The critique in the 1950s was that Northeast cities were in trouble because they couldn't extend their boundaries. They were losing their tax base. ... Middle-class whites were fleeing the city. The Southwestern cities said, 'OK, we're not going to have that problem,"' said Robert Fairbanks, an expert on cities at the University of Texas at Arlington.

But residents and visitors have long complained that there's no "there" to Phoenix. A recent cover story in the New Times, the city's alternative weekly, noted that in the latest version of Monopoly, which names properties after major American cities, the symbol for Phoenix is Camelback Mountain. "A pile of dirt," it observed sardonically.

"One of the characteristics of Sun Belt cities is the downtown isn't the real heart of the city like in the Northeast," Fairbanks said. As a result, there is less activity. Having people there can be a real preventative against crime."

The forces that have reshaped Phoenix are at once creative and destructive.

The city's boom has fueled a churning real estate market. Turnover is quick, say police, and neighbors often don't know each other. That anonymity has lured gangs into to some of the areas most expensive suburbs and turned mission-style McMansions into drug warehouses.

"We're like Costco of the drug world," said Chris Zamora, a narcotics detective in Gilbert, a tony Phoenix suburb and itself the fourth fastest-growing city in America.

"People come here to buy in bulk. They get a cheaper price and send it back East and double their profit," said Zamora, whose unit has begun teaching real estate agents and civic groups how to recognize a drug stash house hidden in the city's expensive subdivisions.

But it's Phoenix's place as a de facto border city that may have reshaped it in the past decade more than anything else. As record numbers of illegal immigrants poured across the Arizona desert in the 1990s, the city became a warehousing hub for a nationwide network of immigrant and drug smugglers.

Rival smugglers

City neighborhoods are littered with "drop houses," where illegal immigrants wait for transportation to cities across the country. Gunfights sometimes erupt between rival smugglers.

In 2003, Phoenix police blamed a 45 percent rise in homicides and a 41 percent rise in home invasions almost entirely on smuggling.

The effects of the human trafficking have rippled throughout the city.

A recent state investigation found 11 used car lots in the Phoenix metro area were laundering vehicles for human traffickers. According to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, smugglers were paying cash for entire inventories and storing the cars onsite until they were needed.

Fake liens meant that if the smugglers were caught, any confiscated vehicles were returned to the lots and used again.

Corruption, gun-running, home invasions, even white slavery have all been side-effects of the smuggling, Goddard said.

"There is certainly a lot of violence. People will swoop down on the so-called safe houses that might have 20 or 30 (immigrants) in them, shoot the guards and take them over," he said. "Now the payments will go to the new group."

Random killings

Still, for some residents it will be the spring and summer of 2006 that showed just how much their city has changed - and brought home the price of the full-throttled growth of the past decade and a half.

As temperatures climbed, Phoenix was being stalked by what police initially characterized as two serial killers. Like the sniper shootings four years ago in Washington, "the Serial Shooter" appeared to hunt random victims.

The Baseline Killer, connected by police to 23 crimes, including rape, robberies and eight homicides, menaced mostly a middle-class eastside neighborhood near downtown.

Elizabeth Gonzalez worked at a fast-food Japanese restaurant on Indian School Road with two of the Baseline Killer's victims. The victims left together after an evening shift on March 14. The body of one was found across the street in a Burger King parking lot, the other in a car a few blocks away.

Gonzalez, 28, was scheduled to work that night, but a suspended license kept her from making her shift. She quit the next day and still can't help thinking it might have been her.

"I used to think Phoenix was great. Now, after 8 (p.m.) we don't do anything," said Gonzalez, who moved here 17 years ago.

She's stopped going to the park with her 3-year-old and instead takes him to Peter Piper, a local pizza chain with an indoor play area. "I don't even put gas in my car," Gonzalez said. "I wait until my husband gets home."

Neighborhood "a shame"

Police say the response to the killers shows the city is willing to devote whatever resources it takes to make Phoenix safe. Two men were arrested in an apartment in August for the serial shootings. One of the two, Samuel Dieteman, called the killings "random recreational violence," according to court records.

And in September, police arrested Mark Goudeau, charging him in a rape linked to the Baseline Killer. This month, police recommended he be charged with the 22 remaining crimes as well.

"At one point, well over 200 officers and detectives were working on both serial cases. ... I had the overtime moneys, I had the monies for everything we need to deal effectively with those investigations," said Phoenix Assistant Police Chief Kevin Robinson, who believes the city has already managed to reverse recent rising crime trends.

So far, Biddle, the retired pilot in Maryvale, hasn't seen much change.

The modest concrete and brick houses of the Maryvale neighborhood were built for returning GIs after World War II. Biddle said his home for 18 years was once a quiet working-class neighborhood where people aspired to something better.

Now, most longtime residents have fled. Crack seems to be everywhere, and graffiti covers signs and walls. Biddle said random gunshots are so common he rarely notices anymore.

He'd leave as well, Biddle said, but spiraling house prices in the rest of the valley and flat property values here make it impossible. He and his wife, who is disabled, feel besieged.

"When you're trapped in your own house, it's a frightening experience," Biddle said. "What's happened to this neighborhood, it's just a shame."

In 2003, Phoenix police blamed a 45 percent rise in homicides and a 41 percent rise in home invasions almost entirely on smuggling.
The effects of the human trafficking have rippled throughout the city.

A recent state investigation found 11 used car lots in the Phoenix metro area were laundering vehicles for human traffickers. According to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, smugglers were paying cash for entire inventories and storing the cars onsite until they were needed.

Fake liens meant that if the smugglers were caught, any confiscated vehicles were returned to the lots and used again.

Corruption, gun-running, home invasions, even white slavery have all been side-effects of the smuggling, Goddard said.

And these are the people that the catholic church is having candle light services for and giving a platform to say how unfair illegal immigration enforcement is............. and they think God is going to be on their side?
Talk about delusional.........