When I initially set
out to write this blog, I considered for a while what the focus would
be. I finally settled on the idea that it would encompass the full
range of things I've encountered in close to five years living here,
along with any new impressions I gather now that I've moved back
after a year on the road. I want to be fair here, I don't want to
emphasize only the negative aspects of the city, nor am I interested
in painting an unrealistically sunny portrait. If you leave out
certain obvious things about the city—the crime, the poverty, the
homelessness—then you're not really writing about Tucson. In a
perverse way, it's those aspects that give the place some of its
character. If you took away the twitchy, sun-blasted seediness that
underscores much of the metro area and the outlying ramshackle
suburbs, you'd really lose something, even though I know that to
maintain that quality means to preserve the chronic poverty and
desperation confronting you nearly everywhere you go within Tucson.
Possibly one becomes so complacent about crime, addiction and
hopelessness that after a while you come to think of it as “local
color”.
I was riding the number
9 bus from Grant and Campbell one afternoon years ago when I
overheard a conversation between three people in the back. I was
only a few seats away, making it hard for me not to pick up every
word. Not one of these people, two men and one woman, seemed to know
each other. Yet in the space of a few minutes they launched into a
discussion of the pros and cons of various local jails they had spent
time in. “I just got out of the new prison. It's better than the
old one.” “Anything's better than the county jail. That place
sucks.” “Oh yeah, I've been in there a few times. Most of the
guards are dicks.”
As I sat listening I
thought to myself, What are the odds? Here are three people who've
never met, who just happen to run into each other on a city bus, and
they all have recent experience with incarceration.
I suppose I shouldn't
have been so surprised. Most people ride a city bus because they
can't afford to drive, or have had trouble with the law that prevents
them from holding a license. Statistically, it might be entirely
probable that a small group of people riding the same bus have
similar experiences with the courts. It got me thinking about the
rate of crime in Tucson and how it compares to other cities in the
U.S.
The numbers can seem
either positive or negative, depending on how you look at them. The
website Area Vibes writes that “[t]he Tucson crime index is 46%
lower than the Arizona average and the Arizona crime index is 25%
higher than the National average.” In other words, not as bad as
the rest of the state on the average, but the state itself is about a
quarter worse than the rest of the country. They go on to say that
“[t]he Tucson violent crime rate is 53% higher than the Arizona
average and the Arizona violent crime rate is 40% higher than the
National average.” Pretty hard to put a good spin on that.
Pheonix's violent crime rate is 29% higher than the Arizona average,
according to the same site, and it's a bigger city.
Percentages aside, I
tend to rely on personal anecdotal evidence when it comes to how I
evaluate the level of crime in the city. I recognize that all cities
have some crime, it's an inevitable part of living in a high
concentration of human beings, but you can often get a sense of the
criminal culture of a place after being there for just a short while,
especially if you spend a lot of time on foot. San Francisco, in the
supposedly mellow state of California, felt like a likely place to
get into a violent confrontation with a stranger if you weren't
careful where you stepped. Over the course of three days, I saw more
people yelling, threatening, or snapping at passerby, whether on the
street or on public transportation, than anywhere else I've been.
Manhattan feels as safe as a theme park most of the time, but it's a
de facto police state where you can't turn around without
seeing NYPD, and though Spanish Harlem was a little shady—somebody
set a car on fire for no discernible reason, and a guy offered us
drugs out of nowhere—that was the worst we saw. Atlanta, GA, in my
studied opinion, is kind of a shithole: I saw a guy get his cell
phone stolen out of his hand on the street, which led to a block-long
foot chase; and the area east of the Five Points neighborhood is to
be avoided by tourists valuing their safety (the city has no moral
qualms about sending tourists there to see the Martin Luther King
Historical District, however, despite the obvious presence of drug
dealers, infrastructural deterioration, and the strong possibility of
being openly harassed, as we were).
One doesn't have to be
in Tucson long to feel the persistent hum of a criminal culture inside the metro area. I'm not talking Chicago in the Roaring
Twenties, more like a low-end commitment to petty larceny, drugs, and
angry shouting. The first police helicopters I ever saw were here,
coming out mostly at night, prowling the airspace with floodlights
scanning the ground in a wide field of artificial daytime. When we
lived in a tiny guest house off Alvernon Way seven years ago, we'd
sometimes hear them circling the neighborhood in the middle of the
night, flying so close to the ground it sounded like they were trying
to land on the roof. One night as my wife walked home from work, a
floodlight stopped on her for a moment before moving on, satisfied
she wasn't the fugitive they were looking for. Down the road, at the
intersection of Alvernon and Grant, the Circle K seemed to get robbed
every other week, yellow tape circling the parking lot with two or
more cop cars parked in front of the store.
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I'll never forget the time I got panhandled by the same meth addict two days in a row, using the exact same elaborate story both times--stuck in town, friend was supposed to wire him money but never came through, collecting money for a bus ticket. He seriously didn't remember me turning him down the day before, and that he'd told me the same thing. Maybe it was presumptuous of me to think of him as a tweaker, but a mummy-like physique, bad teeth and worse complexion tend to be dead giveaways.
I worked at a family-owned store in the same area next to a Fry's grocery store. Over the course of a few years I saw a man tackled by two police officers right in front of the store's entrance, multiple people being nabbed by police in the parking lot for shoplifting, several loud arguments, a drunk homeless man with his pants around his ankles yelling at passerby (this also within a few feet of the store's entrance), I had one bicycle stolen and both wheels stolen off another, I almost had the seat stolen off the same bike (it looked like whoever had tried to take it gave up partway through), I caught a guy smoking meth or crack next to the dumpster when I was taking the garbage out at the end of the day, and one afternoon I watched as a man stood outside of a van and systematically, one at a time, shook soda cans, tossed them in a high arc, and let them hit the ground where they exploded in sunbursts of foam. It was one of the most random things I've ever seen anyone do. He did that for at least fifteen minutes straight and nobody even came over to see what he was doing or why. Did he have more soda than he needed and decided that was the most entertaining way to get rid of it? Was he testing out a new weapon? Did he think he was at the county fair and might win a stuffed Spongebob? I'm never going to know the answer to any of those questions--I'll just live the rest of my life with the image of soda foam splattering against blacktop, and consider that good enough.
That was a pretty bad
neighborhood, but our second apartment, a cheap
but very livable one-bedroom in a complex with a decent pool, was
nestled among quaint, attractive, slightly more upscale
homes. Nevertheless, one night I heard two guys get into a fist
fight in front of the complex, which seemed to consist of one guy
getting punched and then bellowing “C'mon! Let's go! Let's go!
You wanna do this? Let's go!” at his attacker for five minutes. I thought about
calling the cops, but didn't want to get out of bed. Another night
there were four pistol shots about a block away; that time I did
call 911, and the woman on the other end had this tone in her voice
that said “You're bothering me with this shit? Call me when
you're dying.”
Weird things just
kind of happened every so often. Sometime around two in the morning, we woke
up to footsteps on the roof. Our apartment was on the second floor
of a two-story building, and our bedroom was on the southeastern-most
corner. Whoever had decided to climb up onto the roof in the dead of
night (I'm just going to assume they were on the run from the cops,
or bugfuck crazy) came up the opposite end, walked across the roof
until they were right over our bedroom—over our bed, as a matter of
fact—then climbed down to the street using the staggered brickwork
on the corner of the building as hand-and-footholds. We weren't in
any kind of danger, but still...weirdo on the roof at two in the morning.
And there was the crazy
guy who came into the complex (in spite of the fact it was supposed
to be locked to anyone except tenants) moaning “Help me! Help me!”
over and over again. He looked healthy enough, dressed all in black,
and was pretty young, not a day over twenty-five. He stopped at a
door, leaned against it, then slid down to the ground. All the while
he kept moaning “Help me!”. People peeked out their doors to see
what was going on. Before long the apartment manager came out of his
office to have a look. As soon as he came within a few feet of the
young man, the man bolted up from the ground, staggered and spun
around in confusion, and fled the complex. By now I could hear
sirens closing in; I went out to the street to see what would happen
next, and spotted the man booking from behind the building and down
an alley, with a cop car following close behind. If he wasn't nuts,
he must have been on some very interesting drugs. What else could
make a guy go from a helpless, moaning heap to sprinting like an
Olympian in the space of a couple of minutes?
In spite of all that,
Tucson doesn't come across like a dangerous town. It's very seldom
that I don't feel more or less safe here. There are lots of crazy
people, but their madness seems to be focused mostly on themselves.
If there are dangerous gangs, they must stick to their own
neighborhoods, because I've never seen them. What you encounter most
often is a pronounced eccentricity, a skewed approach to existence
that the broad open skies and dry desert terrain seem to encourage.
It can be a beautiful thing, really—I've never been anywhere that
has such a unique collection of kooks, visionaries, artists,
musicians, and freaks. Much more than any of its shadier elements,
it's the remarkable creativity of many of Tucson's residents that I
find most memorable every time we're away, and it's what I most often
mention to people whenever they ask me about where I live.
As I've said before, it
isn't my goal to make Tucson look bad, overrun with crime, inept, or
a city to stay away from. I think more people ought to come here and
check it out. It makes an intriguing tourist destination, a place of
mesmerizing sunsets, great art and music, charming southwestern
architecture, and one of the world's most verdant deserts. Owing to
my personality, there are times when, in the act of describing the
life I've had here, I focus too much on the negative out of morbid obsession and a love for the sensational. I apologize to any
long-time residents who read this and think, “Jesus, why doesn't
this guy just move, then?” Cities are like people, they have good
and bad qualities, and as with any human relationship, you have to
acknowledge all of a city's faults and highlights if you really ever
hope to know it.
And in that same spirit
of good will, look for these upcoming topics:
The All Souls
Procession
The Loft Theatre
The Santa Cruz River
Trail
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