New York City’s beret-wearing vigilantes are back.
Last week, I included a story about the debate among Upper West Side residents surrounding housing homeless men in the neighborhood’s vacant hotels. Reading more about the shelters, I came across Curtis Sliwa, founder of citizen safety patrol the Guardian Angels. And recently, dressed in the group’s signature red jacket and beret, Sliwa promised Upper West Siders that he would “put a lid on” criminal activity in the neighborhood with 60 of his patrol volunteers.
Who is this guy, and his citizen crime-fighting squad? (Oh, and he happens to be running for mayor in 2021 as a populist Republican.) I have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more from him in the months ahead, so here’s a little background on Sliwa and the Angels:
In the late 1970s, Brooklyn-born Sliwa was a night manager at a McDonald’s in the Bronx. Fed up with the rampant crime he saw at work and in the rest of the city, as police ranks had been hollowed out by the fiscal crisis, he formed a group of young people, primarily people of color, to begin patrolling the subways at night. They were unarmed, but made citizens’ arrests and were unafraid to turn to violence in the name of crime deterrence.
In the late 1980s, the Guardian Angels took up residence inside a defunct French café on Manhattan’s Restaurant Row (46th between 8th and 9th Avenues), where they’d been recruited to patrol the block by restaurant owners frustrated with drug-related crime in the area. They stayed for 7 years, in which time Sliwa was shot by a John Gotti associate, and confessed to fabricating several of the group’s early crime-fighting triumphs for publicity, including his own kidnapping. And unsurprisingly, the Angels often clashed with police, who it seems maybe felt a little rivalry with the group, and were mainly concerned with civilians meting out justice to people who “looked” like criminals (and occasionally turned out to be undercover cops).
''It's intense crackdown. We make no bones about that. Our tactics are very intense and very physical, and we feel we have no choice,” Sliwa said of the group’s approach in 1988.
Amid the crime spike of the 1980s, some 65,000 New Yorkers participated in neighborhood crime control groups, according to a 1988 New York Times trend piece on citizens’ arrests (lol :/). The article contrasts the tactics of the Angels with those of members of Bed-Stuy’s Masjid-Al Taqwa, who formed anti-crack squads but made a point of not carrying out citizens’ arrests. “You are not police. You are there basically as a deterrent,” Imam Siraj Wahhaj told the paper.
Today, according to the Guardian Angels website, in addition to the neighborhood patrols they offer a youth center in Washington Heights, animal patrol, and a predominantly women-run “Perv Busters” group. (From the flier: “Keep Your Rocket in Your Pocket.”)
Since the peak of the Angels’ membership (of around 1,000) in the 1980s, over the years it seems anytime there’s a big local crime story—like the string of subway slashings in 2016, or more recently, the looting in the beginning of the summer—Sliwa makes his press rounds. As a radio host since the 90s, he certainly knows how to garner publicity for his efforts. And as he gears up for next year’s election, perhaps the Upper West Side has become his latest stage.
By the numbers…
4 million face masks; 3.5 million bottles of hand sanitizer, 80,000 containers of disinfectant wipes: Cleaning supplies and PPE de Blasio says the city will have on-hand when schools reopen September 10th, and accessible via a principals’ hotline. As for ventilation? Just open the windows, says the city, if you’re lucky enough to have a classroom with even one. (Gothamist)
Around town…
-New York City’s nursing home death toll, already the highest in the nation, could be a significant undercount. (AP)
-Nemo and Mickey, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s bedbug-sniffing dogs, are preparing for retirement. (The City)
-TFW you almost lease an apartment from the Mayor (The New Yorker)
-RZA has created a new ice cream truck jingle to replace the racist Jim Crow-Era “Turkey in the Straw.” (NBC New York)
Taking vacation till the end of the month… see you in September!
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