Tempe councilmembers Bobby Nichols and Brooke St. George condemned how the cops handled a fight on Mill Avenue.

Of course they posted it on Facebook. Everything about this happened on Facebook: the bystander video went viral there, and the union answered there. Hard to disagree when city leadership says, “Every single member of our community deserves safety,” and then points out that the officers are long on violence and short on cool heads.

Here’s what they’re talking about. Around one a.m. on July 19, officers waded into a fight on the Ave. A 21-year-old named Eryn Bonner tried to pull them off a man. She got put on the ground twice. She and an officer went over a bike. Then an officer punched her in the face. Tempe booked her on two felonies: aggravated assault on a first responder and resisting arrest. The county attorney declined to prosecute.

I drive that street. Bar close on Mill is real. Pour a thousand people out of a dozen doors inside twenty minutes, most of them young, many of them drunk, and you have a volatile mix. Fights happen. They have always happened. Getting through one without putting a fist in a 21-year-old’s face is not an unreasonable ask. It should be the job.

In my time on the Ave, across Tempe, and out in the rest of Phoenix, I can tell you without a doubt that the culture of policing we’ve allowed leads straight here. Every time.

If nobody says anything, it keeps going. The people on the receiving end are the ones with the least to fall back on: minorities, the unhoused, and everyday people who only wanted to get where they were going. Bullies pick the ones who can’t hit back. Same instinct here, better equipment.

Of course, the Tempe Officers Association called the comments “irresponsible.” I’d prefer reporters stopped calling these people for quotes. The input is unhelpful and frequently unhinged.

Police associations want more power and less oversight, and they have never once been talked out of that position by evidence. Until one of them surprises me by saying an officer got it wrong, I’ll file their statements where they belong. All monsoon, no rain. Shut up, the adults are talking.

Phoenix-area police have a long history of behaving badly and then treating the complaint as the offense. In 2024 it took the Justice Department to say out loud what the street already knew: a pattern of civil rights violations and excessive violence directed against Black, Latino, and Native people. And the first federal finding anywhere that a department was violating the rights of the homeless.

That’s Phoenix. Tempe, my home base, keeps grinding on its unhoused population. Last year, a former Tempe police commander accused city leadership of misusing a confidential law enforcement database to track homeless advocates. Peoria PD ran the investigation and closed it as unfounded. No evidence of misuse. Worth noting they closed it without interviewing the commander who raised it.

I’m not going to tell you a thing happened that investigators say didn’t. I’ll only say the city has given me no reason to assume the best of it, given how long it’s displayed extremely poor thinking about homelessness and about dealing with the street compassionately.

I know Nichols and St. George are new to the council. I don’t care.

Being new doesn’t make them wrong. If anything, it’s the qualification. They were regular people in this city eight weeks ago; they remember what an officer looks like from the sidewalk. Time in a council seat doesn’t change that. If anything, it pulls people away from the street.

The people elect the Tempe City Council. They speak with our voice. Two people who have seen what happens on our streets and want to make a change got our go-ahead to say so in a building where it counts.

Which earns them the cheers of the people who put them there, and our criticism in whatever measure seems appropriate. Today it’s cheers. They used the seat to stand up for somebody who couldn’t.

Photo: Pixabay

Tempe is changing the Ave again. We’re getting a “gateway sign.”

I put gateway in quotes because Mill Ave doesn’t need one.

You know when you’ve crossed over. The buildings change. The trees change. The street changes its mind about what kind of place it is. You can feel it through the windshield. You don’t need a spectacle to tell you that you’ve arrived.

I’ve spent enough years driving my cab up and down those red bricks to watch the Ave molt more than once. I can’t say every change has been good. I can’t say every change has even been necessary. What I miss most are the people. Sometimes the places too.

Long Wong’s. Rúla Búla. A few old ghosts still know those names.

According to the city, the new sign will hang just north of University Drive: giant metal letters spelling “MILL AVE,” floating about 20 feet above the street between two 27-foot pylons, each letter around 4 feet tall. High enough to clear the streetcar and its cables. High enough nobody’s going to miss it.

It’s public art. Fine. I don’t have a beef with public art.

What I have a beef with is the way City Hall keeps talking about community pride while treating actual community like litter that drifted in on the wind.

Mayor Corey Woods said the sign honors the significance of Mill Avenue, and the city says it wants public spaces that reflect community pride and elevate the Mill Avenue experience for all.

Great. Then open up actual public space.

Stop harassing street rats. Stop treating the red bricks like they’re only public when someone is shopping. Make room for concerts. Make room for art. Make room for the kids with patched jeans, the old burnouts, the weirdos, the broke, the loud, the stubborn, the people who actually keep the Ave from feeling like an outdoor mall with better lighting.

Mill was never colorful because it was polished. It was colorful because people lived on it.

That’s the part these improvements keep missing. You can welcome outsiders, tourists, students, whomsoever’s passing through. But you can’t keep doing that while sweeping away the people who wear the dust of the Ave on their jeans and then pretend you’re honoring the place. We are part of the street.

Installation starts with closures from on Sunday to Monday, April 13, while crews put in the pylons. The sign itself is scheduled to be hung early on April 20.

You’ll find me watching from my cab on the day they hang it.

Come find me. Bring hot cocoa. We can sit there and reminisce about how the Ave has changed, what it’s lost, and what parts of it the city still hasn’t learned to see.

Today, a woman lost her life on Mill Avenue after being struck by a self-driving car operated by Uber, the ride sharing company.

I don’t know that there’s a lot of people looking for the opinion of a taxicab driver on this matter – but this literally happened in my back yard.

Headlines read, “Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Arizona Pedestrian” but what you don’t know from this is that it happened on Mill Ave. From what I understand, this woman was struck when crossing the road near Marquee Theater – if you’re not familiar, it’s across the Tempe Town Lake from the Mill strip.

Uber, and ride sharing companies like it, do take some of the profit of us professional drivers and have for some years now. It’s not surprising: after all, it’s not like people couldn’t drive themselves before taxis became a thing. We are what we are.

The future of self-driving cars is still a way off, so I’m not afraid of losing my job to that either.

For a long time now, I thought that these cars were extremely safe. They seemed to be much more aware of the road and changing conditions than meatbag drivers at least. In fact, many times they were in the news it wasn’t because a self-driving car hit someone: it was because someone hit a self-driving car. Often because that car was being too cautious.

I really have not thought about how driving aggressively has sometimes kept me safe from being in an accident. But, after years of being on the road, breathing exhaust and staring at taillights, I have a certain sense of other drivers and an intuition of how they’re likely to behave at certain times of day.

I have been sharing the road with self-driving cars for a while now. No problems.

I am sure there’s a lot to figure out about these robot cars.

Mill Ave has a lot of pedestrian traffic. At certain times of day, there are so many people walking on the sidewalks and crossing the streets it can feel like Mardi Gras – and sometimes it is Mardi Gras. People don’t always obey traffic laws, in fact sometimes it feels like nobody obeys traffic laws. They will be crossing against traffic, not in crosswalks, wandering into the road.

These robot cars will need to account for that and not hit people who are acting unexpectedly. As I just said, Tempe is a hotbed of unexpected actions.

As a result of this tragedy, Uber has suspended its testing of self-driving cars here in Tempe.

Probably a good start. If you’re going to put new cars on our roads that affect people, you better get them right.

This is Vex, out. See you on the road.

Many of us recall Mill Avenue as a cultural space filled with interesting music, amazing artwork, and a sort of strange Bohemian-revolutionary crowd-filled-menagerie (this was basically what it was like in the early 90s.) That vision and zeitgeist faded swiftly as the Ave began to become also a mecca for corporate storefronts, fly-by-night outlets for major brands, and that culture stomped underfoot for what seemed to be the big-bucks—and then finally died in a fleeting whimper during the economic downturn of the 2000s.

There’s been a few attempts to reinvent and reignite that cultural space and Mill Ave still has a lot of interesting things going on and once again, it’s becoming more of a social and creative space than it has been in a long time.

So when I see articles talking about how investments are pouring into the Ave, they pique my interest. An article in the Phoenix Business Journal caught my eye where a discussion of how tech companies are helping out may help revitalize this still-simmering economy on the Ave (warning pay-wall.)

We’ve seen this slowly creeping in through the cracks—and while I do not put much stock in the Tempe Town Lake or the Light Rail (since neither has been leveraged in a creative or a cultural sense) I do see that there’s a lot that can be done with the crowds and the gathering-space of the Ave itself.

Not too long ago, Tempe thought a Geek’s Night Out would be a good thing, and I agree.

And, there was this (unsucessful) Kickstarter campaign to get a gaming console café on Mill Ave again—no doubt similar to eJoy. I hope that we can see something like this actually work. With the attention of tech companies, though, we might see the visualization of something that could bring in a technologized cultural space amidst what is mostly bars and restaurants.

The City of Tempe has been flirting with amendments to the city code designed to stomp down on “aggressive panhandling.” Since Tempe doesn’t have a very good or compassionate history with the treatment of homeless and street rats on their streets, I meet this sort of addition to city code with a great deal of skepticism when it comes to motives and ultimately its enforcement.

We shouldn’t forget the addition of “anti-sitting” laws to the city codes designed to criminalize sitting on the sidewalk–barring health concerns–after the City also changed the street layout to have less benches and seats (read: none.)

This sort of behavior from the council makes a grim precedent that ignores the reason why homeless people meet on Mill Avenue and adds to the danger of being without a place to stay at night.
Instead of a compassionate and thoughtful examination of why street rats line the red bricks, it looks like the City is continuing to kick them when they’re down. This from an article in the East Valley Tribune,

The City of Tempe stated in a request to the council that, “aggressive solicitation activities create a safety hazard and an increased potential for criminal activities.”

Multiple city council members stated that these changes will create a safer environment in high pedestrian and tourist areas such as the Mill Avenue District and throughout ASU’s Tempe campus.

The amendments would make it illegal to solicit within ten feet of or directly adjacent to the entrance of a business, as well as fifteen feet from any transit stop or taxi stand. This could mean more business for stores in areas where this is becoming more of a problem.

I may be mistaken, but aggressively interacting with anyone is already something that draws the attention of the police and it’s already illegal. The added element of “solicitation” seems like it’s just an addition slapped on top designed purely to target street rats.

The last paragraph explains the underlying reason why we’re seeing this legislation in the City Council: businesses are upset that homeless street rats appear on the streets and would-be Scottsdale customers looking for the white-picket-storefronts would steer elsewhere.

This next part really gave me a chuckle: several people interviewed about aggressive panhandling on Mill Avenue also speak to the situation of street preachers.

Besides panhandlers, Darling said she has seen many people being “badgered” by religious groups trying to spread their message not only on mill, but on campus as well.

“I don’t think it’s horrible,” Arizona State Criminology student Julie Martin said when asked about aggressive religious preachers. “People have the ability to proclaim that, and I think that is one of the basic rights of our country.”

Then again, Religious groups on Mill Ave and on ASU campus have been extremely aggressive in their proselytization.

It’s not uncommon that I park my cab and take the night in and run into these groups harassing people with their extremely loud speakers. Of course, the City of Tempe also recently passed a noise ordinance change that would quiet this excessive use of loudspeakers and bullhorns by religious groups.
As Martin above notices, while religious solicitation may be aggressive (and annoying) it’s covered at least by freedom of speech.

Street rats, however, won’t have these sort of protections. Nobody cares about them. Knowing how the Tempe police have targeted them in the past using similar legislation means that they’ll use the “aggressive” portion of the new codes to sweep them up even if they’re panhandling without aggression.
Even some of the commenters on the article aren’t so sure about this one.

I’m personally not sure where this will go and I don’t like the history of these sort of code changes shows–especially for Tempe.

Mill Ave may become a quieter place this week after the Tempe City Council authorized a program to ban amplified music/speech on the Ave and enforce permits for people who want to use it. The program is a pilot and will take effect shortly, and will last until December 2012.

The Tempe City Council recently authorized a pilot program to control noise in downtown Tempe and determine the impacts of various noise sources. Starting this week, no amplified sound or other excessive noise will be permitted without the issuance of a Special Events Permit within the public rights-of-way in the Mill Avenue District.

The city is selling the project to residents and Mill goers with some piss-poor rhetoric that they could have spun better if they’d only listened to the sorts of problems that people actually have with amplification on the Ave.

The problem hasn’t just been musicians, of course, it’s also been street preachers who bring their own amplification to shout at the masses (and some used to shout into bars and open air restaurants.) For a while there was a preacher named Shawn Holes whose sound setup was so abusively loud that it would have caused inner ear damage to people standing too close.

The boundaries for this area are College Avenue to Farmer Avenue, University Drive to the center of Town Lake (North.) Residential developments within this area include Hayden Square, Edgewater and Bridgeview at Hayden Ferry Lakeside, Orchid House, West 6, Regatta Pointe and others. About 1,500 people live in this area. At least another 1,000 people are expected to live in downtown Tempe in the near future as developments such as The Hub and Villas at Southbank open.

“This is the next step in the coexistence of an entertainment district and a residential area,” said Nancy Hormann, president of the Downtown Tempe Community.

Musicians are still welcome to play on Mill Avenue, but they need to perform acoustically.

And it’s true, there’s a few musicians, such as Papa Soul, who have sound systems set so loud that they’re painful to walk past on the sidewalk.

Residents of the nearby condominiums isn’t a good reason for an amplification ban. Why not simply implement thoughtful noise regulations that require people to get a cheap license to use amplification where they agree not to raise their equipment above a pre-set decibel level? Certainly the city could make a program to cheaply license, teach people how to use the equipment (or deliver a simple FAQ on a piece of paper) and then have the police spot check to determine if they’re in violation.

After all, having encountered the abrasively loud street preachers it’s obvious when a sound system is beyond an acceptable and healthy sound limit.

Of course, not everyone agrees with the assessment that the reason why the noise ordinance is being put in place. The claim is that people live too close to Mill Ave and noise is bothering them—which has always been a bit of a false canard. The drum circle was pushed out of a space backed up away from the Ave because developers constructed a condominium structure back there and residents began to complain, an event that still chafes at my sense of fair play.

“Complete non-sense. There are very few people who actually live within ear-shot of Mill, and those that do know full well that it’s the entertainment district and that some excess noise may happen on occasion,” MillAve4Life notes on the KPHO story. “Having been to Mill hundreds of times I can say, without a doubt, that even on the most extreme nights the ambient noise level is still less than an annoying motorcycle with short pipes. If they’re willing to go this route, why not limit the amount of excess light, surely that bothers the planes that routinely fly low and close to land at Sky Harbor International.”

Mill Ave Amplification Needs to be Toned Down Not Tuned Out

Looking at the total amount of abuse that directly affects passersby from musicians who do not check their sound levels and street preachers who care more about being heard far away than being understood has given me a reason to powerfully dislike the use of amplified speech on the Ave. However, I don’t think that “special events permits” are the way to go and I’m bothered that the law seems to only target musicians.

In fact, the press release about the resolution and all news seems to mention only musicians.

I expect that the noise ordinance covers all amplification including that of speech, otherwise its intended effect will be largely useless as buskers are only amid the worst offenders and do not represent all of them.

Simply getting a handle on how loud amplification can be would be superior to cutting out entirely. Especially because the noise ordinance will not affect businesses, even those who have open air venues with large speakers.

If I were a more cynical sort, I’d guess this ordinance is largely connected to businesses feeling like they’re not king of the hill or most dominant for cultural expression on Mill Ave. We’ve seen them behave this sort of way before at the cost of the actual visitors and people who patron the Ave on busy nights.

A report that appeared this morning in MyFoxPhoenix.com relates the news that part of Mill was shut down by a “suspicious package” that local bomb squad detonated.

The report is extremely short,

Police responded to the intersection of 7th St and Mill Ave after reports of an unattended package near the statues, next to the parking garage.

They closed off the area and the package was detonated by the bomb squad.

After further investigation, it was determined that the package was not a threat.

Fortunately, it also means that there was no danger—however, it might be nice to know what they blew up. After all, once the bomb squad blew up someone’s luggage and shut down the light rail (smoldering underwear everywhere.)

At least we now know that Mil Ave is open again and ASU is safe.

Thursday afternoon saw a crisis hit Mill Ave when fire broke out on the roof of Urban Outfitters and My Big Fat Greek Restaurant. The Tempe Fire Department shut down Mill around the intersection with 5th as the fire was fought.

According to an article in AZCentral, the fire is still under investigation,

My Big Fat Greek Restaurant in downtown Tempe caught fire Thursday afternoon, according to fire officials.

The clothing store Urban Outfitters was also briefly shut down because of its proximity to the restaurant. It has since been reopened.

Firefighters made a first alarm response to the scene around 4:30 p.m., according to Tempe Fire Department spokesman Deems Shepard. He said grease from the kitchen had caught fire in some ductwork.

No injuries are reported, but it looks like the restaurant will be closed indefinitely as repairs and investigation are underway.

Since the fire currently appears to have started at My Big Fat Greek Restaurant and spread to Urban Outfitters, chances are the retail clothing store will be reopening soon enough.

I’ll try to keep everyone updated on this. The last time Mill Ave saw a considerable fire was when the Andre building caught fire in August, 1999.

According to news reports, traffic was restored to Mill Avenue last night.

Every now and again, I look around YouTube to see how the community of the Internet feels about our red bricks.

This one seems to be made by a well-voiced narrator and some lovely editing using background sounds and static images. Take a gander.

Link, via YouTube.

Head over to YouTube and leave some comments too, let the producer know that Mill Ave has fans.

It looks like Occupy Wall Street has come all the way down to the Sonoran Desert and even visited the red bricks of Mill Ave. Saturday evening a few dozen protestors gathered right in front of P.F. Cheng’s restaurant—you might know it: the spot with all the weird block-shaped artwork sticking out of the ground.

MyFoxPhoenix.com ran a video addressing the protest (however, it cuts off right in the middle of some woman’s speech…) From the article accompanying the video,

A few dozen demonstrators showed up in Tempe Saturday afternoon for an Arizona version of “Occupy Wall Street” protests, and their message was the same as everyone else’s — they want our nation’s damaged economy fixed.

A cry of solidarity could be heard for miles as valley residents readied to “Occupy Tempe” and kick corporate America out.

The group gathered at the intersection of Mill Avenue and University Drive for a street action to raise awareness — a peaceful protest they hope will bring about change.

Occupy meme protests have spread across the entire United States. While the initial protest emerged in New York a few blocks away from Wall Street, I have seen reports of protests at Seattle, WA (#OccupySeattle), Portland, OR (#OccupyPortland), Boston, MA (#OccupyBoston), among many others. One is even planned for Phoenix, AZ (#OccupyPhoenix) that involves a march that will start next Friday, wind through downtown and then finally come to rest and occupy Ceasar Chavez Park.

As I haven’t been able to get down there this week (most of my fares have me driving through north Phoenix lately) I’m not sure if #OccupyTempe is still across from the newly built CVS.

Don’t bring your own chairs people: City of Tempe apparently has an ordinance against it

Recently, a few friends of mine decided to run a D&D session on Mill Avenue–last Friday in fact–according to their accounts, they were approached by three bicycle police officers. They were told that the City of Tempe does not allow people to sit on unaffixed chairs on public property. The officers then went on to also tell a nearby busker with a guitar that he could not use a chair either.

I am told they’d set up three chairs, a table, and some tabletop gaming paraphernalia in front of the US Post Office on Mill Ave and 5^th St.

The game continued even after dismantling the chairs and table–although on the ground instead.

For the curious, I’m told that it’s a floating 1^st Edition Dungeons & Dragons game.

Questioned, one of the participants stated, “We just want to bring a little weirdness to Mill Avenue.” The spokesperson police officer nodded, then responded, “Oh, it certainly doesn’t need any more of that.”

As a fan of Mill Ave, I think the cop in question certainly shows little regard for what is good and proper weirdness.

Does anyone else believe that this police attention to chairs on Mill Avenue—which had not happened to previous D&D sessions with chairs on the Ave—might be part of a reaction to attempting to avoid an Occupy movement to appear in Tempe?

Perhaps the officers have received a memo to be on the lookout for people with chairs and shoo them away (or at least their chairs.)

The timing seems suspicious.