Bree Florence, Staff Reporter
The march spread across Van Buren, stretching from Seventh Avenue to First Street. Protesters marched up and down the street while passing cars honked rapidly in support, a cacophony that could be heard every night for the past four nights in Phoenix.
In the distance, fireworks sounded.
Right at the 8 p.m. curfew, police responded to a series of plastic water bottles thrown into their ranks with a canister of tear gas on Third Avenue, a level of action which hadn’t been seen until much later in the evening the past few nights.
The marchers banded together, moving north toward the ASU downtown campus.
“Don’t stop moving!” people encouraged the group. “We can’t stay still.”
The group was closely followed by a motorcade of police officers in riot gear, S.W.A.T. trucks, and a pick-up truck with a speaker. “This is Lieutenant Benjamin Moore,” it played. “In the name of the people of the State of Arizona, I hereby declare this an unlawful assembly…”
To the left, a protester grumbled, “We are the people of Arizona.”
To the right, police officers were ordering a driver from his car on Pierce Street and made an arrest.
At around 9:00 p.m., we had circled around and were making our way toward Seventh Street to regroup with the main body of protesters when an officer stopped us.
“It’s curfew, you’ve got to go now,” he told us.
Behind him, dozens of various law enforcement vehicles were approaching Seventh Street from Fillmore, including a S.W.A.T. truck which had broken down in the intersection from overheating.
We watched from a block away as the events on Seventh Street unfolded around 9:15 p.m. Tear gas rose into the air, we heard screaming and loud banging, and saw flocks of people running down the block toward us.
The protesters had scattered, dispersed by several bouts of tear gas and chased by patrol cars rushing along Seventh Street. The vehicles circled fleeing protesters along Roosevelt and Fourth Avenue, and folks fled in all directions to avoid arrest, some with red, watery eyes.
On the corner of Fourth and Pierce streets, a white couple perched in front of their house, behind a metal yellow sign that reflected the red and blue siren lights. The woman called to passing people, “If you need a safe place to rest, come sit here! This is private property. They can’t arrest you here.”
Michelle Hunter and her 17-year-old daughter, Emma, sat on the wall of the property; their signs were laid down beside them. They had been protesting peacefully both Friday and Sunday nights, Hunter said, and were ready to leave. But now they were stuck as the police circled and their parked car was eight blocks away.
After quarantining for three months, Hunter said this was the first thing she left her house to do.
“It was just important for us to be here because we’re tired of seeing it, we’re tired of the police brutality, the unarmed black men being murdered for no reason,” Hunter said. “It’s sad when I have to, as a mother, have a conversation with my 10-year-old black son about how he shouldn’t be confrontational with police, how he can’t reach for his phone or anything in the glove box.”
Hunter and her daughter both condemned the violence, looting and vandalism. She said whenever they could, they assisted other protesters in catching those who committed criminal acts and turning them over to the police.
Friday night, Hunter and her daughter were both struck in the legs with rubber bullets after water bottles were thrown at the line of officers barricading the Phoenix Police Department Headquarters. She recalled no one pushing the fence or trying to storm the complex, but the water bottle had soared over their heads and in response they were fired upon.
“The black people are the ones who are trying to keep it nonviolent,” Hunter said. “It takes just a few people to ruin it for the rest of us.”
Police officers continued to make arrests throughout the evening, with over 200 arrests on counts of rioting, unlawful assembly, disorderly conduct, and curfew violations, according to a media release from Maggie Cox, a sergeant with the Phoenix Police Department.
Madeline Ackley, Arts and Entertainment Editor
On a normal Sunday night, the area near Roosevelt Row and the Garfield neighborhood would be relatively quiet, but this Sunday, the streets downtown were alive with a different kind of energy.
The sounds of tear gas canisters, screaming protesters, rubber bullets, and police sirens filled the air at the intersection of Roosevelt and Seventh streets. For downtown residents, a sight like this couldn’t be more foreign.
Protesters in Phoenix, like dozens of cities across the nation, are marching in opposition to police brutality against people of color, a debate ignited once again with the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and inflamed further by the officer-involved death of local man Dion Johnson.
In response to the chaos of the previous three nights of protest, Gov. Ducey declared a state of emergency and imposed a week-long 8 p.m. curfew.
Phoenix Chief of Police Jeri Williams calls the curfew an extra “tool” for law enforcement to distinguish between “individuals who may be frustrated or may be beside themselves at the death of George Floyd…and those individuals who wanted to commit criminal acts,” she told KTAR.
Despite the order, at least a thousand protesters remained on the streets after curfew. Police declared the protest an unlawful assembly shortly after 8 p.m., but the march continued mostly unabated.
The crowds moved through the streets to avoid police blockades. They marched down Seventh Street toward Roosevelt chanting “Black lives matter,” “Hands up, don’t shoot,” and “No justice, no peace” and it was shortly beyond that intersection where protesters and police reached an impasse.
Tear gas was fired toward the crowd in the minutes before 9 p.m. pushing protesters back. There were shouts and groans of pain from those exposed to the gaseous eye irritant.
But protesters in goggles were ready with jugs of milky concoctions, flushing the eyes of their fellow demonstrators.
Directly next to me, a protester smashed a window of the Jimmy John’s on the corner of Roosevelt and Seventh Street. Other protesters screamed at him to stop as he bolted from the scene. Cop cars raced into the sandwich shop’s lot.
The crowd became raucous as an officer arrested an individual in the blocked-off intersection. “He’s an old man!” one protester shouted. The crowd, which had mostly gathered across the street in front of the UCP building began hurling what appeared to be water bottles in the direction of the police on the other side of the street. Chants of “hands up don’t shoot.”
The protester’s unruliness wasn’t tolerated for long. Police in unmarked vehicles penetrated the crowd. Police in riot gear emerged and began firing rubber bullets, dispersing the crowd almost immediately. Those who weren’t arrested took off down Roosevelt Street into the historic Garfield neighborhood.
Later reports indicate that between 100 and 200 people were arrested that night.
It’s hard to imagine that hundreds more won’t be arrested in the coming weeks.
Contact the reporters at bmfloren@asu.edu and mkackley@asu.edu.
Madeline is the community editor for Downtown Devil and is a senior studying at the Walter Cronkite School. She is a local freelance journalist who primarily covers politics, policing, immigration and business. In 2019, she won first place in her category in the national SPJ Mark of Excellence Awards for her reporting on deported veterans in Tijuana, Mexico with Cronkite News.
