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Daniel Matlick

Fourth Avenue Street Fair during better days.

The Fourth Avenue Merchants Association has canceled the 2021 Fourth Avenue Spring Street Fair citing the high number of COVID-19 cases in Pima County and abroad.

The merchant’s association made the announcement on Tuesday morning in a news release:

Without obtaining the proper permitting, we are unable to produce the 2021 Fourth Avenue Spring Street Fair. Our City officials along with our local Health Department are the guiding forces when it comes to issuing our permits. Each City is operating under Their own guidance and regulations. These regulations and standards may differ from other cities in the State. We appreciate and support the leadership and guidance of the City of Tucson and the Pima County Health Department.

The 2021 Fourth Avenue Winter Street Fair is still scheduled for Dec 10-12, according to the release.

This is the third Fourth Avenue Street Fair to be canceled due to the ongoing pandemic. 

PHOENIX – May Tiwamangkala remembers mornings at Perryville Prison west of Phoenix, when the Wildland Fire Crew members began chanting and stomping their feet on concrete to let the rest of the prison know it was 5 a.m.

On their training runs, she recalls, one veteran on the all-women crew would shout, “Who are we?”

“Fire crew!”

Her next shout: “Be phenomenal!”

“Or be forgotten!”

The Perryville crew is one of 12 17-person crews of incarcerated firefighters in Arizona, and the only crew of all women. But once crew members leave prison, they often face difficulty getting hired as firefighters, typically because they lack documentation of their work or can’t get the required certification as emergency medical technicians because of their criminal records.

WASHINGTON – The Arizona Capitol is surrounded by two rows of chain-link fence and police presence has been increased, as authorities brace for possible violence in response to the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden.

The preparations come amid reports that the FBI has warned of possible armed protests at all 50 state capitals, on the heels of the violent mob that breached the U.S. Capitol as Congress was certifying the election of Biden. Five people died in that attack, including a Capitol Police officer.

The FBI Phoenix office said Thursday that it “has not received any specific and substantiated threat to the Arizona state capitol or other government buildings,” but that it is working with state and local authorities to track security concerns.

Arizona Department of Public Safety spokesperson Bart Graves said in an email that the fences were installed around the Capitol complex “out of an abundance of caution” on Jan. 7, the day after the assault on the U.S. Capitol. Protesters also surrounded the state Capitol for hours the same day the U.S. Capitol was stormed, with some of the crowd in Arizona armed, according to news reports.

When Kim Dine took over as the new chief of the U.S. Capitol Police in 2012, he knew he had a serious problem.

Since 2001, hundreds of Black officers had sued the department for racial discrimination. They alleged that white officers called Black colleagues slurs like the N-word and that one officer found a hangman’s noose on his locker. White officers were called “huk lovers” or “FOGs” — short for “friends of gangsters” — if they were friendly with their Black colleagues. Black officers faced “unprovoked traffic stops” from fellow Capitol Police officers. One Black officer claimed he heard a colleague say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.”

In case after case, agency lawyers denied wrongdoing. But in an interview, Dine said it was clear he had to address the department’s charged racial climate. He said he promoted a Black officer to assistant chief, a first for the agency, and tried to increase diversity by changing the force’s hiring practices. He also said he hired a Black woman to lead a diversity office and created a new disciplinary body within the department, promoting a Black woman to lead it.

“There is a problem with racism in this country, in pretty much every establishment that exists,” said Dine, who left the agency in 2016. “You can always do more in retrospect.”

Whether the Capitol Police managed to root out racist officers will be one of many issues raised as Congress investigates the agency’s failure to prevent a mob of Trump supporters from attacking the Capitol while lawmakers inside voted to formalize the electoral victory of President-elect Joe Biden.