"It’s almost 3:30am and it’s been a relatively quiet evening. Then we run into the first major..."

“It’s almost 3:30am and it’s been a relatively quiet evening. Then we run into the first major trouble of the patrol. There is a loud man shouting at a group of about 6 other men a block away. He’s obviously agitated, walking quickly and screaming at them. He has a bulky jacket and a red backpack. One of the men he’s shouting at is a homeless man we spoke with earlier in the evening, who is in a wheelchair with only one leg. Phoenix rapidly breaks down what he wants everyone to do. He has Cabbie get ready to dial 911 and warns us all that he can’t be sure but the angry man could be armed. It’s strange that he’d be so confidently aggressive to a large group of people and it would be easy to hide a gun in his jacket. Phoenix lays out where we should run to cover in case a gun is pulled. I begin recording on the second GoPro but make sure to always have a car or lightpole roughly in front of me. This is getting a bit scary.”

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Chris Piers wraps up his four-part profile/interview with real-life superhero Phoenix Jones.

I have to admit - I was kind of making fun of him before he flew out to Seattle for being a Phoenix Jones fan. The whole thing just seemed pretty silly to me. Chris was at my house a couple of days before he left, showing me YouTube videos of the crime fighter and I just kept saying things like, “He’s suspicious of everyone and he probably creates the escalations just by being there.” He reminded me of this kid Jose I knew growing up who would pretend to be a cop all the time, pinning us against walls and confiscating our bikes. 

But there’s really a lot more to the man than the cowl. Chris sums it up pretty nicely:

It all serves to throw into sharp relief the difference between a comic book superhero and a real life superhero. The fictional hero gets to see the car first, then the thief. The fictional hero gets to break up a drug deal because he knows it’s going down. The fictional hero gets to knock out an aggressive man without worrying about any legal consequences or danger to bystanders. The real life superhero must tread a much more delicate line. But the drug dealers that had to walk on at the beginning of the patrol? The group of people who were not attacked? The homeless people given clothes and food? Those are real results.

So, yeah, maybe some of the videos is Phoenix inserting himself into a bunch of drunk people being drunk. But even if the guy has a 10% success rate, it’s still better than my success rate, which is zero, because all I do is watch the YouTube videos and make snide comments.