For many, the Guardian Angels probably seem mythological rather than historical, and even though they still exist (in a much-abbreviated form), they seem like a part of New York’s past.
Founded in 1979 as a civilian crime-watch organisation, the Angels soon became iconic, swarming around Manhattan in their red berets, red jackets, or white T-shirts with the red Guardian Angels logo of an eye inside a pyramid on a winged shield… operating like benign vigilantes. The very idea of them was probably as meaningful as their actual presence, as it made both residents and visitors believe that there was a group out on the streets actually looking after them.
They soon became portrayed as streetwise superheroes, standing guard on subway trains, discouraging violent behaviour, and administering citizen's arrests. Importantly, they made people feel safe. I saw patrols of them when I first visited New York in the early Eighties, and they not only contributed to the rich patina of the city, but you knew as long as they were in your eyeline, you were never going to be mugged.
The Guardian Angels in New York made people believe they were looked after
Faith in the police always waxes and wanes, particularly in cities, where intimidation is often caused by a sense of abandonment. What police forces rarely pay enough attention to is presence: if you see a policeman on the street, you usually feel safer. The Met hasn’t exactly got a blameless record when it comes to dealing with public disorder, while systematic racism has become a worrying counter-narrative, but police presence is generally regarded as a successful deterrent.
But sometimes you just have to do it yourself. Recently, an organisation in California has shown what can happen when a community mobilises itself. A year ago, East Palo Alto was the murder capital of the United States, the Tombstone of its day. It had more homicides per capita than any place in the country. While it was (and still is) one of the wealthiest cities in America, it was ravaged by crime and drugs, most notably crack. For 30 years it was torn apart by an epidemic that caused Sharifa Wilson, its ex-mayor to say, “We were the supermarket for drugs”.
Wilson started to transform the city’s fortunes by requiring new businesses to hire locally, the police chief put more officers on the street and, crucially, a local resident, Larry Calloway, launched an organisation called Just Us, which involved the community acting as citizen police in areas of high drug trafficking. They bought themselves a bunch of two-way radios and notebooks and started behaving like amateur sleuths.
They would frequent street corners and copy the licence plates of any car that came to buy drugs. The police would then find the owner, and simply write them a strongly worded letter letting them know their vehicle was recorded in a high-crime, high-drug use area. And because they had the backing of both the mayor and the local police force, the policy worked.
Not only was Just Us taken seriously by the authorities, but because they had the city authorities behind them, they started to be taken seriously by the public, too. Unlike the Guardian Angels, who were always treated with suspicion by the NYPD, Just Us has proved that simple civic collaboration can have extraordinary success.
Today, 30 years after being labelled the murder capital of the USA, the city ended a whole calendar year without a single homicide. “We’ve always had at least one, and to reach zero is just such a monumental achievement for our whole community,” said Police Chief Jeff Liu, who said he texted the whole force on New Year’s Eve to celebrate.
It just shows you what can be done when people convene, organise and mobilise. Wilson doesn’t think their success in Palo Alto is any kind of miracle, merely the result of the successful coordination of citizens who cared about the place where they and their families lived. “The message is community, community, community,” she said recently. “Because it was the people that worked together to make it better.”
Would something similar work in London? Of course it would. And I know plenty of people who live in Tottenham, Acton, Chelsea and in fact just around the corner who would be willing to help. If the police would let them.
