Police sweeps sanitized the notorious prostitution corridor. But residents, advocates and survivors say the real work is only beginning.
By Jimmy Magahern | Photo composite by Mirelle Inglefield
You don’t have to travel the 27th Avenue corridor in West Phoenix on the regular to know its rep.
On YouTube channels like Town Streets (which has 45.8K subscribers) and Blade Tales (30.1K) – named for “The Blade,” which is what the stretch of 27th roughly between Bethany Home and Indian School roads is called on the street – hours of dash-cam footage show barely dressed young women stepping into headlights, leaning toward slow-moving cars and drifting along side streets between homes and small businesses. For tens of thousands of viewers who may never set foot here, the corridor plays like a mix of voyeuristic entertainment and crime reel.
“I met with Sheriff Jerry Sheridan recently,” says Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell, who has made the corridor a priority for her office. “And he had just returned from a national training where they talked about our 27th Avenue being third in line in terms of prostitution activity, behind only Vegas and New Orleans.”
Residents didn’t need a ranking to understand the problem. “It was literally in front of houses,” says Marvin Scott, co-chair of the Berkeley Square Neighborhood Association, one of the first neighborhood groups to organize around sex work besieging the area. “Like, right in front of my house.”
Scott had worked as an elementary school music teacher in the neighborhood more than a decade ago, and liked the area. But when he moved back to the corridor in 2019 (see sidebar), he found a street shaped by round-the-clock nefarious activity and a sense that the neighborhood had lost control of its own sidewalks – even as the squeaky-clean Grand Canyon University campus grew and fortified nearby. “At one time, it was absolutely terrible in my neighborhood,” he says. “We couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening.”
What’s happening along 27th Avenue now is more complicated than a crime reel. In recent months, the corridor has become the focus of an aggressive anti-prostitution push led by Grand Canyon University and the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, an effort that’s changed the street’s look but not necessarily its underlying conditions. Residents say the neighborhood finally feels like it’s fighting back, but advocates for sex workers say the women caught in the sweeps are being pushed around without being offered a way out.
How – and whether – those efforts can move the corridor toward safety in a way that also feels like justice for the people caught up in it is still an open question.
“Arrests do help, and so does the humanitarian effort,” Scott says. “They both help, and they’re both needed. It’s not one or the other.”
Grand Canyon University had been raising alarms about the corridor long before the sweep. With property straddling the corridor, stretching east from 35th Avenue past I-17, the university saw the street’s problems as a direct threat to student safety and community stability. “They have been very concerned about this 27th Avenue corridor for some time,” Mitchell says.
For a Christian university with some 25,000 students enrolled – including more than 16,000 living on campus – the visibility of prostitution outside its gates was also a jarring mismatch with the world GCU tries to cultivate inside. So, when the Legislature sent $2 million to the County Attorney’s Office for anti-trafficking work, GCU joined the Phoenix Police Department, Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Department of Public Safety and other agencies in a broader push to confront what had become, in its own words, “an epicenter” of prostitution.
“Operation New Beginnings” launched in two phases last fall, resulting in dozens of prostitution-related arrests along 27th Avenue – 47 over a three-day stretch in August, then 22 more in November. In the first sting, at least one juvenile victim of child sex trafficking was recovered. The arrests were coordinated by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office and carried out by a mix of agencies, including GCU Police, the Phoenix Police HEAT Unit, MCSO, DPS and the Cactus Park precinct teams. After the arrests, GCU says the Phoenix Family Advocacy Center attempted to meet with the women while they were separated from traffickers, offering counseling and other services.
Phoenix Police de-emphasizes its role. “Operation New Beginnings is specifically run by Grand Canyon University,” a spokesperson would only say. “The Phoenix Police Department does assist in the operations, but all statistical information is gathered and archived by GCU.”
GCU, for its part, stresses that the sweep is only one piece of a bigger neighborhood campaign. In a statement, the university pointed to its leadership of 27Collab – a coalition of more than 80 schools, churches, businesses and agencies working on everything from added lighting and private security to expanded support services for trafficking victims. The sweep, it said, is meant to complement those efforts, not replace them.
Mitchell’s office, which received the state’s $2 million allocation, saw the operation as a chance to interrupt what they viewed as a growing, entrenched problem and show some visible enforcement, demonstrating to residents that the neighborhood was not being abandoned to the activity they’d been reporting for years. “We don’t want to pour $2 million into this and see no change,” she says, adding that the two sweeps won’t be the last word. “We’re not done yet.”
Still, what the operation appeared to change on the surface hasn’t yet matched what many victim-service providers and sex worker advocates say is happening underneath.
“These operations never go after the power structure,” says Tucson-based filmmaker and former sex worker Juliana Piccillo. “They only go after the people surviving it.”
The people arrested in the sweep were almost all charged with misdemeanor prostitution – and while the majority were women, advocates note that Phoenix’s street-based sex trade also includes transgender people and men whose experiences are often less visible in public footage, but no less precarious.
To Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, director of the ASU Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research, it’s not surprising that the operation is going after the least protected link in a system built on coercion and instability.
“Nine out of 10 women arrested for prostitution in Phoenix identify as being trafficked – either as children, now, or sometime in their lives,” she says. As a researcher who has spent more than two decades studying trafficking in Arizona, she says we’re missing the target. “These women are the minnows, but we’re not going after the big fish. If we would get the fish, the minnows would be fine.” The problem, she explains, is structural: “The victim is forward-facing. The trafficker is behind, on the phone. It’s hard to link the behavior you see to the person telling her what to do.”
Talking with sex workers seldom leads to their employers. “They’re scared,” Roe-Sepowitz says. “Traffickers are super scary and dangerous, to be honest. There’s a lot of reasons not to tell law enforcement.”
Additionally, she says the operation didn’t change the one thing she believes matters most: what happens immediately after an arrest. “They weren’t given any of the structure we offer,” she says. “We couldn’t contact them in jail because they didn’t go through city court. They had no opportunity for diversion at all.”
Diversion – the interventional program that the City of Phoenix Prosecutor’s Office spent a decade developing – involves trauma screening, counseling, safety planning and service referrals. Upon completion, charges are dismissed. But because the sweep was led by GCU and supported by DPS and MCSO – not Phoenix Police – the arrests didn’t go through Phoenix Municipal Court. They landed in a Justice of the Peace court, where diversion isn’t offered. In practice, that meant the women arrested were never screened for trafficking or connected to the services the city normally provides.
For many of the women, Roe-Sepowitz says, the consequences were immediate. They missed trafficker-imposed quotas (“Their trafficker doesn’t say, like, ‘You get two weeks off because you’re in jail.’”). They lost access to medication. They returned to the same streets, in many cases, in worse shape than they’d left.
Piccillo, who spent years in the sex trade, says the dynamic is familiar. “You’re not gonna end exploitation, coercion, trafficking and pimping with police arrests,” she says. “You’re just moving it further into the shadows, and when people have to work in the darkest recesses, where they feel like they can hide from the police, you are putting those people in sometimes mortal danger.”
The ACLU of Arizona sees the same danger in enforcement-heavy crackdowns. “Criminalizing sex work heightens violence and undermines the safety and autonomy of sex workers,” says ACLU spokesperson Alex Gonzalez. “Instead of preventing sex work, criminalization pushes it out of public view, limiting workers’ mobility and forcing them into more vulnerable and isolated situations.” Concentrated sweeps, he adds, can break apart support networks and reshape where and how the work is done, “many times amplifying risk instead of reducing it.”
“It’s punishing poverty, essentially,” Piccillo says. “It’s not unlike displacing homeless people. Homeless people don’t cease to be homeless because you destroy their camp and move them. And sex workers don’t cease to be sex workers. They don’t cease to need money to buy food and pay for shelter because you’ve moved them from one stroll to another stroll.”
Piccillo, who left the street but later went back to sex work for a period when her children were young (“The reality is, when you have kids and bills and no safety net, you go where the money is”), says many women develop real ties to the neighborhoods where they work and the other workers, who look out for one another. “People assume everyone wants out immediately, but a lot of women actually like the communities they’re in,” she says. “What they want are better working conditions – safer spaces, less violence, some control over their own lives.”
To her, the problem isn’t the geography so much as the lack of options. “If the goal is safety, then give people safer ways to work or safer ways to leave,” she says. “Either one requires more than just arresting them.”
What happens after the arrests is the part the neighborhood still has to live with. For longtime residents, 27th Avenue has always been more than the headlines suggest – and the prostitution crackdown has definitely improved their outlook.
Eric and Eileen Bolze, who’ve run a custom manufacturing and fabrication shop, E2 Innovations, just off the corridor for nearly 25 years, describe the past decade as a slow grind of endurance. “It’s almost like homelessness was relocated to the area,” Eric says. “And with that, crime, drug use and prostitution then followed.”
One day, he says, there was a stabbing and a shooting at the same intersection. “That’s when we said, ‘We can’t accept this as the new norm.’”
The Bolzes were among the first to join cleanup days, alley-lighting pushes and meetings that would eventually form the backbone of what became 27Collab. “You’re getting people aware of each other,” Eileen says. “Not being little islands.”
They’ve seen small wins pile up. The Royal Inn, a fleabag motel on 27th that once served as a magnet for exploitation, finally shuttered; new lighting was installed in the alleys; private security was coordinated; and businesses started to take a chance on vacant properties again. One spot on Bethany Home Road is even slated to become an ice cream shop. “I think that’s so cool!” Eileen says. “We’re excited for that.”
At Alhambra Traditional School, principal Andrew Feight says families still ask about safety, but the tone has changed. It’s less fear and more insistence – parents wanting to feel like the street belongs to them again. “We had to tell parents what their kids might have seen on the way to school. That’s not what schools are set up to do. We’re supposed to be focusing on teaching and learning,” he says. “Now I don’t have to distract kids or drive certain routes anymore to avoid what’s happening on the street. That’s made a big difference for families.”
Jeff Spellman, a resident who’s worked for years to improve conditions with the Violence Impact Project and now as part of 27Collab, acknowledges that the neighborhood may not be fixed, but says there’s more scaffolding now – people showing up, streets being cleaned, adults talking across institutions that didn’t used to coordinate.
“We used to lie in bed at night and listen to gunfire from cars driving up and down 27th Avenue,” he says. “Now, we seldom hear gunfire, and when we do, police have been very successful in tracking it back to the source.”
Faith leaders feel the effects, too. Gwen Relf, CEO of Rehoboth Community Development Corporation, works with families whose lives can collapse under even brief disruptions.
“For the people who call this area home, durable, meaningful success would mean a welcoming, diverse and thriving community,” she says. “A place where people are free to live, work, pray and play without any concerns about their safety.”
For Marvin Scott, who has pushed for solutions from both police and service providers, he believes the progress he’s seen – on his block, in his neighborhood – has come from people refusing to ignore what was happening and refusing to let enforcement define the whole story. “We just had to get together as neighbors and figure out what to do,” he says.
Still, even as neighbors celebrate the early wins on 27th Avenue, everyone agrees prostitution is a game of Whac-A-Mole without a more serious extra-enforcement effort. Feight says he’s already seen the activity slip south on 27th, clustering “between Camelback and Indian School.” County Attorney Mitchell is less specific in her predictions, saying that traffickers and buyers simply go wherever there’s “a major thoroughfare, with certain types of businesses” to shield them. Phoenix has no shortage of such terrain – from Van Buren’s aging motels to the I-17 frontage roads and 19th Avenue, as well as second-tier vulnerable strips along McDowell, Indian School and industrial pockets of Grand Avenue, where lighting, transient lodging and/or economic instability create seams for the trade to regroup.
The challenge ahead isn’t just suppressing one hot spot, Roe-Sepowitz says, but closing the structural gaps that allow the next one to form.
“There’s a big difference between addressing a problem and just pushing it away.”
Phoenix’s Trouble Spots: A Brief History
From early Phoenix to the present, the city’s red-light districts have tended to migrate rather than disappear.
In the early 1900s, the notorious vice hub known as “the Deuce” sat just south of Downtown, near Second Street, where flophouses, brothels and saloons operated in plain view. Today, the name survives mostly in memory – and as the inspiration for The Duce, an event venue with a Prohibition-era aesthetic that trades on the district’s past as it occupies a now-legal patch of the old warehouse strip.
By the mid-20th century, prostitution and street-level sex work shifted west to Van Buren Street, which for decades was shorthand for Phoenix’s most visible sex-trade corridor. Police crackdowns and Downtown revitalization eventually thinned that activity, too – as one official involved in the current crackdown recounted, the thinking then was simply, “You get rid of the girls, you get rid of the guys.” Modern thinking acknowledges that enforcement doesn’t erase demand, it only displaces it.
By the 2010s, much of the Valley’s visible prostitution had reassembled along 27th Avenue, where aging motels, poor lighting and the usual mix of cash-based storefronts and underlit lots that make a corridor easy to slip into and out of created the conditions for the city’s newest epicenter. GCU says the coalition has added “additional video cameras and lighting along 27th Avenue properties,” part of what it calls a broader effort to make the corridor less hospitable to crime.
