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As he retraces Atkinson's route, wheeling through the last moments of his life, Davila comes upon the shrine where the officer died. Davila had tried, in his quiet way, to live beyond the stereotypes that divide police and community, white and Hispanic. And now there were people out there stirring it up, the vultures and hacks, politicizing Atkinson's death before he was in the ground. At the spot where the afternoon sun still draws a cross on the wall, Davila's spirit breaks again. "You had people calling the radio talk shows to take their shots. It started with illegal aliens, and then it was, 'Let's send all the Mexicans back.'" Some of his officers were jumpy too--ready to crack down on immigrants. "I told people that it's not whites or Hispanics who killed Marc," Davila says. "It's drug-dealing cop killers. The issue isn't ethnicity--it's crime and drugs." Losing Atkinson was bad enough. Davila was determined to lose nothing more.
Tom Martinez, 59, has been on block watch for 18 years in the neighborhood where Atkinson worked and died. "You see this older woman out front? She's undercover. Reports everything to us." Martinez works for the recreation department. The friends who ride civilian posse with him work construction jobs and return to their well-kept homes each day with aching backs and cracked hands, and then they take turns pulling night duty, trying to pass pride of ownership and safe streets on to the grandchildren. "We've been burglarized 10 times, and nobody ever sees a vehicle or a person," says Tom Sapien, 51, who peers into the twilight from Martinez's backseat and misses nothing. "People are afraid to get involved."
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.
Davila knew he had a cultural clash on his hands when he took a call from a resident complaining that the next-door neighbor was growing corn in the front yard. New immigrants, Davila says, are "suspicious of cops. In Mexico most of a policeman's salary is from bribes. They think we're going to beat them up or take their money." It doesn't help that while Hispanics make up more than 28% of the 1.2 million residents of Phoenix, they account for only 12% of the city's police.
To all of this, add the drug problem. On May 5, police stumbled onto the biggest drug bust in city history--a ton of cocaine valued at half a billion dollars--and arrested two Mexican nationals. A federal drug official told the Arizona Republic, "Phoenix has arrived...as a drug transshipment point."