Seattle’s Phoenix Jones, the 23-year-old non-mutant crime costumed crime-fighter, should join The Avengers, and get Bikini Coffee Sex with one of those famous baristas. Seriously.
Consider that Phoenix Jones, one of a set of masked, costumed people who consider themselves “superheroes” – and are – goes out five nights a week on a crime fighting spree that at times is lethal. Now, after allegedly pepper-spraying a group of night-owls he said was fighting and not dancing in the streets as he claimed, Phoenix Jones has been arrested and charged with assault, and is to be arraigned Thursday.
Who Is Phoenix Jones?
Phoenix Jones’ real name will not be used here in protest of the Seattle Police releasing his name to the public. He’s a 23-year-old African American man, who works with autistic children, and focused his anger over being robbed into a practice that causes him to wear a bullet-proof vest-equipped rubber suit very much like the one created for Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. According to the SeattlePI.com the suit has “body armor, a ballistic vest, arm and leg trauma plates — and a ballistic cup.”
Jones is a member of a Seattle-based group called The Real Life Super Hero Movement, which consists of several masked people. Here’s a glimpse of them at a pub-crawl event in the spring of this year:
But of all of them, Phoenix Jones is reportedly the only one who actually acts to prevent a crime as it unfolds.
Therein lay the problem. When is a crime, a crime?
Jones has reportedly stopped a man from stealing a party bus, and got into a scuffle with two would-be attackers. But of late, some so-called criminals have taken up the practice of calling the police against Jones. That’s what happened in the latest incident, which follows the rule that the police generally take the side of the person who called them, rather than make a fair assessment of the situation and act accordingly. In Jones case, he was said to have assaulted four people, even though a video clearly shows that he was being attacked and chased after by a purse-twirling woman dressed in black fishnets.
She’s not a superhero.
Here’s the video:
It’s hard to show where Jones was the attacker or deliberately sprayed pepper spray. But that written, Mark Twain is quoted as saying “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” In the case of Phoenix Jones, going out five nights a week to find crime may have caused him to misdiagnose a situation and read it as a crime in the making.
This blogger does not know the case details beyond what’s reported, but it’s clear Jones is using a lot of pent-up sexual energy that’s better spent either with his girlfriend, or dumping her (since she’s an enabler according to reports) and hooking up with the Bikini Coffee girls for sex. Phoenix Jones is too locked into an approach that’s not getting him the community relations results he wants, and needs to make a change of some kind.
The Super Hero Movement
For whatever reason, perhaps one borne of the emergence of on-screen superheros from pop-culture, like Iron Man, Superman, and Batman, there’s a growing movement of people in real life who dress up as superheros. There was even a recent fictional movie about it called Griff The Invisible starring Ryan Kwanten as Griff, who is very much like Phoenix Jones.
There are more and more “Phoenix Jones-types” running around – an estimated 200 nationwide according to the RLSH website. There should be some way of having people who chose that walk of life to register with a police division that monitors their activities, sets standards for participation and for physical fitness, and protects them. In other words, gives them a license to fight crime. Otherwise, as police budgets decrease and more would-be citizen super heros pop-up, there will be someone who uses the idea to harm people.
A Real Life Super Heros Registry would help curb such activity.
In the present, the Seattle Police should help Phoenix Jones, not jail him.
Stay tuned.