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The trouble with Angels

By Kevin Steel ⋅ July 3, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The Guardian Angels want to help Canadians fight growing crime problems. So why are some cities reluctant to let them?

It wasn’t Curtis Sliwa’s first visit to Calgary, but it was the first time he’d seen the city like this: people smoking crack in the open on the street; junkies shooting heroin in inner city parks. “The way somebody might light up a cigarette and smoke it in the park, they’re just pulling out the works, strapping it on, popping the vein, and injecting,” Sliwa says.

The 52-year-old New Yorker is the founder of the Guardian Angels, a sometimes controversial citizen patrol, recognizable by their distinctive red berets. Twice before, in the late eighties and early nineties, Sliwa was in Calgary to lecture on urban crime at a local college. He toured the inner city, and says it was then “a little scruffy.” But this visit “was a mind-blowing experience,” he says of all the disorderly conduct he witnessed on his recent tour, May 6-7.

This time, Sliwa was visiting at the request of some Calgarians interested in setting up a Guardian Angels chapter there. One of them, David Baxter, started worrying a couple of years ago about the growing level of violence in his city. “There was a lot of gang-related stuff, drug dealing, drive-by shootings, muggings,” the 52-year-old warehouse manager says. One day, surfing the Internet, he stumbled across the Guardian Angels and wrote to Sliwa. Today, he’s co-ordinating the first Calgary chapter’s startup, tentatively set for August.

Often, when Sliwa shows up in a city like this, he’ll get a gruff reception from officials and local businesses. After all, wherever the Guardian Angels turn up, it’s a sure sign there’s a crime problem that’s out of hand. In Toronto earlier this year, in the wake of a rash of shootings there, Sliwa rolled into town to announce he was setting up a local Angels chapter. The mayor refused to see him, and police made it clear he wasn’t welcome. He told reporters he “got the fleabag treatment, and I might as well have been a terrorist from al Qaeda.” Former New York City mayor Ed Koch was a vocal critic of the Angels when they first set up shop in his town. In Washington, D.C.’s Adams-Morgan district, local business owners told the Angels to get out, unhappy with the “ghetto” image their presence implied. When Sliwa dropped in on Edmonton a few days before his Calgary visit, reportedly at the behest of concerned local residents, police there refused to meet with him, and the police union president has called the Angels “over-the-top vigilantes.”

But in Calgary, Sliwa was actually welcomed by officials–sort of. He met with the Calgary police, who agreed to an information-sharing arrangement, and Mayor Dave Bronconnier, who commented, “If the Guardian Angels or any other group has an idea of how we can ensure . . . a higher degree of public safety, I’m quite prepared to listen.”

Bronconnier may have been being more diplomatic than direct–perhaps not wanting to appear in denial or close-minded about his city’s crime problem, as some have accused Toronto’s David Miller of being. And Calgary does have a problem. Though overall crime rates across North America have been declining slightly over the last 20 years, Calgary’s 13 murders this year already match the total for all of 2005, and the number of assaults has been steadily increasing since 2004. Crack and heroin use is rampant in some areas of the city.

In an interview with the Western Standard, Bronconnier says the city is “neither encouraging nor discouraging the Guardian Angels coming up to give advice. I think it’s not so much the establishing of a chapter as you are really hearing a cry for help from the citizens who live in the east village,” Bronconnier says. Shortly after the meeting with Sliwa, Bronconnier’s government got very busy trying to address a crime problem that was now suddenly attracting international attention. On May 11, city council voted to increase spending on public safety by $15.7 million, including hiring 18 additional cops to patrol high-crime areas.

As an extra-judicial group, capable only of making citizens’ arrests, the Guardian Angels can’t be effective without the support of the city and the police force. Sliwa twice set up chapters in Toronto–first in 1982, then ten years later–but those failed, and Sliwa has blamed Toronto police for refusing to respond to arrests the Angels made.

In his 27 years running the organization, Sliwa–a former McDonald’s manager who started the Guardian Angels with a dozen fellow New Yorkers in 1979, as the city’s crime problem was spinning out of control–has attracted plenty of controversy. In the early 1980s, the Angels grabbed the media spotlight with a series of amazing encounters: they stopped a string of attacks on subway token booths; they intervened in assaults; they found a wallet loaded with money and returned it. “So they got a lot of really positive press and this burst them on the scene,” says Kevin Haggerty, director of the criminology program at the University of Alberta. “That’s the mythology of the Guardian Angels.” After a brush with death in 1992, when he was shot after a hit was put out on him by the Mob, Sliwa admitted that several of the high-profile incidents had been staged. “This is an incredibly tainted organization,” says Haggerty.

Today, Sliwa acknowledges the hoaxes were “a huge mistake.” At the time, he says, they were part of a PR war with the New York police, who were unwilling to acknowledge the work the Angels had done. But the Angels’ founder wants people to focus on the whole history of the organization. In the nineties, the group made a big fan of Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor who eventually cleaned up New York’s crime problem. Japan’s prime minister has praised the Angels’ work in his country. The group now has chapters in 60 cities across four continents.

Whether Calgary is willing to support one remains to be seen. Inspector Bob Couture of the Calgary Police Service met with Sliwa. He says his force is open to considering any type of community-based initiative, such as Block Watch, Seniors Watch or Citizens on Patrol. But he won’t say when the CPS might decide whether to endorse a Calgary Angels chapter. “We have two fundamental concerns of their approach,” he says. “One, they maintain their right to intervene in criminal activity, and [two], they maintain the right to detain individuals that are allegedly involved in criminal activity.” He says that kind of activity poses risks for the Angels, the suspects and innocent bystanders.

That the Angels aren’t accountable is what concerns Haggerty. “At the broadest level, the organization is a self-appointed vigilante organization,” he says. “They are not authorized by the state . . . They have no oversight, effectively.” But Sliwa rejects the vigilante label. “A vigilante is judge, jury and executioner, and when have we ever been accused of being that?” he asks. “In 27 years, having made hundreds of citizens’ arrests, having done thousands of physical interventions, we’ve never been sued, and that includes in cities where there’s been 10 lawyers for every one citizen,” Sliwa says.

With or without official endorsement, the Guardian Angels plan to set up their first Canadian chapters in Calgary, Edmonton and Toronto later this year. But without support from the cops and city officials, there’s no guarantee they’ll last any longer than the last time they tried setting up shop in this country. And whether they’ll make a difference in fighting violent crime in those cities will probably have less to do with the crime problem itself, or the Angels’ own effectiveness, and a lot more to do with whether Canadian metropolises are willing to deal with the image a citizen patrol creates–that of a crime problem that appears to be out of control.

[This article appeared in the July 3, 2006 issue of the Western Standard.]