Photo Credit: Arizona’s Family
We all know that Scottsdale typically strikes a nice balance between being a quiet place to live and raise a family and having a robust party scene. When that robust party scene turns into streets being blocked off with street racing, and thus imperiling others, it has gone too far.
Street racers recently took over the intersection of Camelback and 68th Street near Scottsdale Fashion Square. Along with blocking the intersection with drifting cars, a gun was also discharged.
Street racing has proliferated around various parts of the state recently. The city of Phoenix has had to deal with a recent spate of it and is deploying Phoenix PD and the County Attorney’s office to deal with it. Glendale has also had to deal with this issue and made some arrests recently as a result. While this issue isn’t new, seeing it happen in our relatively sleep city is jarring.
Mayor Ortega denounced it strongly at the beginning of a City Council meeting recently, and we’re glad that he did. Additionally, doing so near the Fashion Square, a shopping behemoth with an incredible amount of sway in our city, is potentially poking another different hornet’s nest. Anything that imperils their ability to bring in customers has historically been dealt with strongly and swiftly, and this certainly fits that description.
We’ve all been young once, and we’ve all done stupid things that we were young. Hopefully we mostly did things that only endangered ourselves and not others though, and this does cross a line. Challenging both a city and a powerful center of commerce is a new degree of Dumb however, and the perpetrators may soon find out what happens when you cross both of them. Hopefully the consequences will be enough to end this nonsense for good in Scottsdale.