"The product of your services"

So if you told me that this morning I would be getting lectured by a Phoenix police officer, I might have laughed at you. But I also would have been wrong.

So I was outside in our parking lot as the morning "porter," and was happy to see that the Police were actually in the area. Not only were they here, but they were doing something. This was almost too much for me. Often times, we will call the police department because some dudes are beating the living crap out of each other on the street or someone is dealing drugs nearby. The last two times I've called or been with someone who called, it has taken at least 20 minutes to get a patrol car here. Once they do get here, the problem of course is no more, so their presence at that point is useless. If they do get here in a reasonable amount of time, they’re just pissed that they have to be here dealing with this particular group of people, so they don’t do much then either. You might be able to tell at this point how satisfied I am with the Phoenix Police Department.

So this morning they were working. One PD Sergeant, who seems to frequent the area, was supervising some volunteers to move out the shopping carts on the street. Some of the homeless keep carts with all their stuff in it, but a lot of the time the carts are for drug trafficking. So they collected most of the carts on the street and threw them out. This makes us happy and keeps the area looking good. It reduces the drug dealing a little bit and discourages people from “camping” out of their carts on the street. I went out to talk to this Sergeant, and he ended up giving me a lecture on how we need to be more involved in the upkeep of the streets (picking up garbage mostly). He said that all the garbage was only being encouraged by us ("the product of our services). Because we offer services to people, it is our fault that they stay on the street outside our building. If this sounds like it doesn’t make sense, that’s because it really doesn’t. The cleaning up the area part is all well and good, but we’ve been told several times that we have no right to be harassing people out on the street because it is not our property.

So I really didn’t appreciate this Policeman lecturing and talking down to me about how we are part of the problem here. I wanted to tell him that I thought the PD was doing such a great (terrible) job here, but I didn’t think that would help. Another person who works in the area and frequents Andre House told me that this Sergeant’s idea for cleaning up the area is closing us and the nearby liquor store down. Makes a lot of sense to me. Which brings me back to my original thought that the PD is worthless.