Lest you think I’m crazy because I drive across the city to do my grocery shopping…
This incident happened where the closest Costco resides. There’s also a Walmart and a Target in that shopping center. I feel distinctly unsafe in that parking lot, although the Costco gas station seems OK — because Costco hires a guy to stand out there and keep watch. The area around the Target does not. Wouldn’t get out of my car on the Walmart side, not on a bet.
That shopping center is on Conduit of Blight Blvd, a ribbon of slum running from the downtown area all the way up to North Phoenix, many, many miles. That garden parkway is flanked by blight, decay, and slum from where it starts, near the state capitol, all the way up to the 101 freeway in the North Valley. This Circle K, scene of a milder incident, is within the Conduit of Blight corridor — about 5 blocks from CoB itself.
Why anyone would go into any convenience store — be it a Circle K or a QT or whatever — escapes me. Those places seem to be perennial targets, no matter where they’re located. There sure are plenty of them along Conduit of Blight, though. Here in the ’Hood, a few weeks ago we had an incident where a guy shot a transient for stumbling into a Circle K women’s room after the guy’s daughter. Killed him dead. The transient, that is.
Moving to the Pointe Tapatio by way of adding distance from Conduit of Blight may not solve the problem. The entire city is pretty crime-ridden. Here’s a fine adventure that happened in Litchfield Park, a far-flung suburb where middle-class folk move specifically to get away from this sh!t.
The solution, if there is one, may be to move out of this overcrowded and still bloating city. If you don’t want to live with criminals, stay out of the fifth-largest city in the country.