The Bird covers the waterfront on Sheriff Arpaio’s racial profiling patrols and demands freedom for First Friday bohos

Doesn't say anything about racial profiling, or pulling over Pedro for a driving sans headlights. Granting the MCSO, a deeply flawed law enforcement entity, 287g powers was a massive mistake. The 287g agreement with the sheriff should be rescinded. Unless ICE wants to be held responsible when one of the MCSO's dunderheaded dragnets morphs into a full-fledged conflagration.

BATTLE OF BELL

Sheriff Joe blinked during the Battle of Bell Road. Despite having gas canisters at the ready, SWAT team in position, and barricades out the ying-yang, if the operation had gone on for much longer, Arpaio might've done his General George Custer impersonation.

About 700 pissed-off Hispanics jammed the parking lot where the MCSO had established its mobile command center on the operation's first night. According to police scanners, deputies couldn't even get their cars off the lot at one point.

Emotions ran high, with weeping women yelling into bullhorns and wags deriding lined-up deputies with cries of, "You are my heroes. You get paid $30 an hour for doing nothing!" Musicians lightened the mood, with Australian guitarist James Quercia composing a ditty that became the protesters' unofficial anthem:

"People everywhere/Running down the street The crowd is thinning out/Running from the heat Sheriff's on the prowl/People on the move I said, 'Uh-oh, Joe is here.'"

Things turned uglier when the pistol-packin', snaggletoothed bigots of Rusty Childress' United for a Sovereign America showed up. One woman wore a protective mask for fear she would catch a disease from Hispanics. Others bore signs with such racist lies as "71,000 Americans killed by illegal aliens since 9/11." Though most of the protesters were Mexican-Americans or present in the country legally, counter-demonstrators urged them to "Go back to Mexico!"

Against such provocations, local leaders like Salvador Reza and Alfredo Gutierrez helped maintain the peace, forming a line of men to keep demonstrators away from the U.S.A. knuckledraggers. Someone threw a Coke can at the nativists at one point, and they whined that The Bird would never report it, being that he's partial to the anti-Joe forces. The Taloned One told them not to be babies, to take it like the tough guys they pretended to be.

The evening ended with the main MCSO wagon pulling out at 11 p.m. The next night, it was all over by 8:30 p.m., though the day had been far uglier, with more nativists, higher barricades, and a slightly smaller crowd of pro-immigrant demonstrators.

Taunts were exchanged, water bottles tossed. One guy on the pro-immigrant side got popped after lobbing a container of H₂O at the U.S.A.-ers. The Bird would've advised the fella to hurl an empty one so the nativists would've had something to urinate in, à la Buffalo Rick.

Some cat looking like a young Charles Manson in a purple T-shirt with a Latin quote on it walked onto the lot with a shotgun strapped to his back, mumbling something about being a "peacemaker" and doing the Lord's work. Neither side claimed him. And the MCSO quickly bagged him.

With many nativists openly armed, and some anti-Joe protesters perhaps packin' concealed weaponry, the appearance of Purple T-shirt Man was an eerie warning that it'd only take one nutjob to kick-start a bloodbath.

One of The Bird's acquaintances on the nativist side of the argument, Clyde O'Briant, who resembles Chuck Norris, minus a few decades, agreed that things had approached the boiling point on the second night.

"It was volatile," admitted O'Briant, who said he's not a member of any org and had been on-site for hours. "It was getting to the point where it was going to explode. That guy with the shotgun almost did it."

When the MCSO broke camp, the situation diffused, and people went their separate ways. Will it take blood on the streets next time to prove that Joe's brown roundups are a menace to public safety?

ART CRIME

If you wanna talk about a fake crisis, this smart-ass avian urges you look no further than Phoenix's First Friday, where gallery owners and the city are conspiring to corral vendors and artists in hopes of taming the once-a-month free-for-all up, down, and around Roosevelt Street downtown.