# The Guardian Angels: An Interview with Curtis Sliwa A volunteer group of street kids makes the subways safer and wins the support of New Yorkers. **URL:** **By** Robert Capozzi **Published:** August 1, 1981 --- ““You get respect, that’s why,” he said.” Their name sounds as if it was invented by Marvel Comics. Their ages are usually between 17 and 24. Their occupation—actually a hobby—is to keep the subways of New York free of “geeks” (slang for muggers, slashers, pickpockets, purse thieves, and other vermin). They’re the Guardian Angels, and they’re the hottest thing to hit New York City since disco. Curtis “Rock” Sliwa started the group, just two and a half years ago, when it was the Magnificent 13 Subway Safety Patrol. The Angels are now 700 strong and growing. The Guardian Angels’ headquarters is located in Sliwa’s own apartment in the Fordham University area of the Bronx. The walls are plastered with press clippings about the Angels and Sliwa, either doing a good deed or denouncing New York City officials for all the hassles that they have given the group. It is here that Sliwa granted an interview to _LR_’s summer intern, Robert Capozzi. The largish living room is lined with old, beaten-up furniture. Sliwa sits on one of the couches, alone, watching the 6 o’clock news. Other Angels are crowded onto the rest of the furniture in the room, giving Sliwa his “space.” He gives a brusque “Hello” and focuses his attention back on the television, where a reporter is discussing the city subway system’s lack of air conditioning. Sliwa sits calmly, angularly, with legs crossed, ankle on knee, and watches intensely. The telephone rings, and he snaps to attention and walks deliberately to the kitchen. The rest of the Angels, mostly young blacks and Hispanics, sit pensively. Sliwa returns. “Julio, take your patrol to the D train and meet L Patrol at the platform at 34th Street,” Sliwa barks in his Brooklyn accent. “Then patrol the park until 10:00. At that time, you are to report back to Headquarters.” Eight Angels, wearing their bright red berets and Guardian Angel Subway Safety Patrol T-shirts, exit quickly. No sooner does Sliwa sit down than the phone rings again. He swiftly stands and goes to answer it. For the next three hours most of Sliwa’s time is spent directing the endless flow of Angels on different patrols, or talking on the telephone, telling chapters in the other boroughs of New York where they should patrol that evening. The members of a visiting chapter from Philadelphia, easily distinguishable by their camouflage fatigue pants and heavy combat boots, float in and out of the steamy apartment to discuss different safety tactics with Rock. Sliwa’s composure is remarkable through it all. He communicates effortlessly with minority Angels, though he himself is of Polish and Italian descent. When he finally sits down to talk to _LR_, Sliwa makes it clear that he doesn’t want to discuss politics or be associated with any political group. It is apparent that he has been interviewed before. He looks at you straight, talks to you straight, and leaves you with the impression that he is a man in command. When the interview is over, Sliwa instructs another patrol to escort _LR_’s reporter through the subways of New York. When they patrol, they travel in single file, not quite marching, attracting attention wherever they go. Particularly receptive are the senior citizens that they pass, who greet the sight of the Angels with, “You’re doing a great job.” On patrol, the Angels are disciplined, almost to the point of being subway scientists. When a train approaches, the patrol leader yells, “Spread out!” Each Angel takes one subway car, enters it, and stands attentively until the train comes to the next stop. Then each goes to the automatic doors and, in a crouched position, looks down the platform to see if a fellow Angel is in need. If one is, he or she will waive the red beret as a signal. One Angel described to _LR_ why he became a Guardian Angel. “You get respect, that’s why,” he said. “This city is so big and so bad that you don’t mean nothing to no one. But if you’re an Angel, you’re somebody, and at the same time you’re helping the City.” The public seems to agree. As one young subway rider put it when the Angels were at the Yankee Stadium subway platform at 155th Street, “You got to admit that they’re legit.” LR: How many active Guardian Angels are there? Sliwa: There’s 700 in New York City, and there’s 400 others outside of New York City. LR: Where are those affiliates located? Sliwa: There are nine operational chapters—where there are actual patrols—and six chapters in the training phase. The chapters where there are actual patrols are in Los Angeles; Atlanta; Philadelphia; Stamford, Connecticut; Jersey City; Hoboken; Newark; Elizabeth; and Trenton. The six chapters in formation—in training—are Boston; Miami; San Francisco; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Cleveland, Ohio; and New Orleans. LR: What happened when the Angels went down to Atlanta? Sliwa: Four months ago, right in the midst of the hot and heavy killings of young black children in Atlanta, the Guardian Angels decided amongst ourselves that we would send a delegation to Atlanta. Not to catch the killer, as many other people had tried to do: swamis, mystics, like a three-ring circus—that, I might add, the city officials of Atlanta had paid for to come and put them up. But the Guardian Angels said we were going down there to organize young people in those black housing projects where young blacks were disappearing, to patrol their area. Looking out for their fellow youngsters, getting parents aware of watching their kids (which is _totally_ nonexistent down there; there are no block watch programs). In a city of two million, with a public safety commission headed by Lee Brown, with a fund of millions, there are only 200 volunteers actively working in Atlanta. That’s why the killings have continued. The Guardian Angels went down there, didn’t ask a penny from anyone, didn’t cost the city anything, didn’t cost the state of Georgia anything. And we were met by official resistance, from the mayor, Maynard Jackson, and the Public Safety Director, Lee Brown, who said how critical it was of us to think we could down to Atlanta and help the situation. There are no subways in Atlanta! We weren’t needed; we weren’t wanted; no one asked us—they wanted us to get the hell out. But, although the 11 Guardian Angels who went down to Atlanta had no money, no place to stay, no way of getting around; when we arrived, people were there to meet us at the train station, provided us with a place to stay, with a van, gasoline, a headquarters, a telephone, food to eat while we were there. The Atlanta Guardian Angels, the 11 who came from New York, had _more_ facilities, had _more_ things available to them, than the chapter right here in New York that has existed for two and a half years. Now the situation in Atlanta is this—the 11 Guardian Angels have returned, and we have a chapter in Atlanta of approximately 18 individuals that are on patrol in those housing projects, organizing young people into block watch programs to keep an eye on the kids. LR: What do you think of other organizations which model themselves after you? Sliwa: Well, nothing’s been brought to my attention. LR: I know of a group in Washington, D.C., which is called the Young Dillingers. Sliwa: Oh, yeah. I got a call from them. I’m kind of suspicious of that group. The director of the program called me up, asking for information on tax exempt status, how I formed the Guardian Angels, and all that—and then I started questioning him on the Young Dillingers. I said, “My God, why did you pick a name like the Young Dillingers? That’s a name for outlaws! Dillinger’s a hero to criminals.” Well, these are all ex-gang guys, and dudes who’ve been busted for serious crime. I view those kinds of programs as poverty pimp programs. Generally people develop these programs hoping to be able to attract federal, state, or city financing of the program. Particularly when dealing with the very poor areas and the individuals who have criminal records, they are trying to use it as a reclamation-type program. They’re just trying to get seed money. I don’t play that ball game. LR: How come you _don’t_ play that ball game? I’ve seen in the press that you don’t want to take any money from the city, you don’t want to get involved with the Transit Authority, and so on. Why is that? Sliwa: That has been an ongoing battle that has existed for two and a half years, even since the inception of the group as the Magnificent 13 Subway Safety Patrol, on February 13, 1979. Initially, it was greeted in a very hostile manner by the Mayor’s office, and also by the Transit Police Commissioner. And they’ve been negative ever since—except last Friday, June the first. The city, after two and a half years of trying to discredit the organization and dissuade public opinion from supporting the group, after several months of negotiations, _finally_ recognized the Guardian Angels officially, decreed that we are an independent and autonomous organization and _not_ an extension of the police department. They adopted a code for the police department, in which the Police Commissioner addressed the members of the department, directing them to fully cooperate with the Guardian Angels. In return for that, the Angels would submit their names for record checks and identification cards— we would let the police know in advance who we were, what we were doing, where we were going, and how we were doing it. They would supply us with training in the Penal Code and the right of citizen’s arrests. Understand that this is the only police department in the United States that will now be training citizens to make citizen’s arrests. LR: So you think that this is a positive move. Sliwa: Oh, I think if you look at the overall effects of the agreement, it gives hope to any citizen out there who feels pressured by the bureaucratic red tape and political inefficiency—through the fact that if you form an organization and the people in the group are dedicated to the self-help principle of pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, sticking through it, thick and thin, and eventually succeeding, winning out, that the benefits of that struggle will be seen in the fact that you can maintain your independence, be able to deal with problem areas without constantly being imbued in political red tape. Previous to this, the analogy has always been that unless you cooperate with the government, and you give in and let yourself be coopted through federal funding, state or city funding, and allow the government to oversee your procedures, then you will be destroyed because you will have a lack of people power, a lack of emotion involved in it, and a lack of money. LR: Why don’t you accept government money? What kinds of strings would they put on you if you were to accept it? Sliwa: Well, number one, the government has a history of getting involved in local community-organization-type programs. Coming in with reams of paperwork, reams of administrative detail, and, in essence, a patronage system, which is the pipeline of politics. One must understand that jobs in the realm of politics are created as a vehicle of patronage, to ensure the electoral process and the continuation of those that are in power. You give a person a job; you prescribe to them that on Election Day they go out and hand out leaflets to get people to vote for candidates of that party, and they get the job. That’s an age old tradition, not just in the United States, but in certain Western European countries. Accept that. Don’t try to counteract it. Understand that it exists. But, since we consider ourselves a self-help role model—one that is pure of those types of infringements and one that has proven its ability to operate outside of all those entanglements—we’re not going to be one to suddenly toss in the towel and say, “We’ll take the easy road out.” We do not want a program where we are located in midtown Manhattan, in a skyscraper office on the 98th floor, with 50 secretaries madly typing paperwork, and with two Guardian Angels (who are the patrol, the entire patrol) who are patrolling the lobby of that building with two $10,000 walkie-talkie units. That’s not what we want the Guardian Angels to become. LR: How do you do all of this financially? Sliwa: Six months ago, the federal government recognized the activities of the Guardian Angels. It was a strange turn of events, when you consider that the city bureaucracy and the city police were very hostile to the idea. Even though we didn’t have a patrol in the center of government—Washington, D.C.—and most congressmen and most political officials in the federal government have never experienced a Guardian Angel patrol, the IRS saw fit to recognize our activities and grant us our non-profit, tax-exempt status. Our feeling is that we don’t want to accept a penny from the state, city, or federal goverment—although we can, through our charter. We aren’t seeking it; we don’t want it; if they gave it to us tomorrow, we’d ship it back. But individuals have contributed to us from time to time when we had a particular need. When we first started the group, I was a manager at McDonald’s. Each and every Guardian Angel is fully responsible for his or her own personal expenses—the cost of the shirt, the cost of the beret, the cost to ride the bloody subway round and round. Sixty cents, just to protect the rights of people and their property; you still got to pay sixty cents to go on the Coney Island joyride that we call our subway system. Believe me, it’s no joy to be out there. God forbid you were injured while on patrol. You’re fully responsible for your own medical expenses. You have to incur all the expenses—time, clothing, food. It’s very time consuming, and, naturally, it’s expensive also. That’s the self-help motto of the group. But there are expenses in running a national organization, where you have to communicate with 15 different chapters which each have different needs and are at different stages of development. So we are very dependent on the generosity of the public to pay for our $1000-a-month phone bill. Our rent here ($200), and all of the other necessities just to keep it afloat—which previous to this were negligible, and I was able to finance out of my own personal savings. I’m not working now, because I have to operate this 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not because I’m forced to, but because I want to. But it also needs to be done. LR: How do you feel about Mayor Koch and the other city officials? Do you think that they resent you, and indeed, that they want to obstruct you and the Guardian Angels and what you’re doing? Might it be that you’ll make them look bad? Sliwa: I think that, number one, now that they are officially tied to us through that agreement, they really have no choice. They made their bed, and they have to sleep in it. LR: How about prior to the agreement? Sliwa: They were doing everything that they could possibly do to discredit us and knock us out of the ball park. They were hot and heavy to totally eliminate the Guardian Angels, if at all possible. At this particular point, even though there’s an agreement, they’re very uncomfortable with us, there’s no doubt about that. But they acceded to public pressure. Public opinion polls have indicated that 75 percent to 80 percent of the public at large favored the Angels, and were opposed, at that time, to the officials’ negative reaction toward the Angels. For 11 days, two months ago, we collected signed petitions totalling 185,000. Some organizations can’t accumulate 185,000 in a lifetime; the only reason we didn’t accumulate more is, we ran out of paper. All a Guardian Angel had to do was stand on a corner with a petition, and a line would form. The public responded by giving us an overwhelming signal of support, which signalled the politicians that, “Hey, it was an unwise and unpopular move to denounce the Angels,” and forced them to come to that agreement with us. They’re not comfortable with us. I don’t think that they’d invite us home to the wife and kids. They’re suspicious. LR: On that note, it has been reported in the press that you were abducted by some transit cops and threatened. Is that true? Sliwa: That’s still under investigation by the District Attorney. What happened was, three gentlemen that night picked me up in a car, alleging that one of my members had been injured while on patrol at about 6:30 that night. I got into the car, as I’ve done on other occasions, and just assumed that they were taking me to the hospital. Instead of taking me there, they just continued to drive me out to Long Island, and we eventually ended up on Jones Beach. We pulled into a parking lot, where we had a conversation which, I would say, lasted at least a hour, in which overt threats were made to me. It was indicated to me that they were aware of the movements of my family on an hour-to-hour basis. They proved that to me, by relating to me, hour-to-hour, where I had been the last two days; where my dad, mom, and two sisters had been. There were only three of them in the car, and so there was no physical way that they could have covered all five of us. So I knew they weren’t joking around. LR: What does that say to you about the police and their relationship with the Guardian Angels? Do they really see you as a threat? Sliwa: I don’t know if it’s so much the average cop. I have to believe that a cop down in the subway, stuck there by himself with nothing but a gun, a nightstick, and a walkie-talkie, is very happy to see a Guardian Angel patrol. If that police officer was ever in need, the Guardian Angels would be there to protect that officer, as well as civilians. We’ve done that on two occasions. In fact, it’s been reported that we’ve saved the lives of two transit police officers in the line of duty. (They have at times objected to the use of the strong words, “saved the officers’ lives,” but they have indicated that we were there to help an officer in a sticky situation.) So I think that the value of the patrol has already been proved, tenfold over. I would think that the average cop knows that we’re the only people he can depend on—other than cops—down there in the time of need. But the union, which represents the cops’ interest, has convinced its membership that the Guardian Angels are a vital threat to the future hiring of police—potential layoffs, potential welfare systems, sending the kids to college, the whole bit—so that no longer does the cop look at the potential good of the Angel patrols in terms of the individual help that can be offered to him, but as a possible (number one) taking of a job, stealing of the limelight. Because, let’s face it, the Angels walk through and people applaud, clap, pat them on the back—and the cop is standing there, and all they do to the cop is yell and scream. We’re not saying that we’re cops. We’re not saying that we’re trying to be cops. We don’t serve the same function. We don’t do one-tenth of the things a cop has to do: we don’t give violations; we don’t stop people from smoking, drinking, playing loud radios. We are purely a safety patrol, and we are there to protect the right of citizens and their personal property, but we can overlook a hell of a lot of things that a cop can’t—the selling of drugs, the taking of drugs, pimp-ing, prostituting. The cop is the only visible extension of authority, that emanates right from the Mayor’s house. So, you can’t yell at the Mayor; you can’t yell at the City Councilperson; you can’t yell at the judges, the Governor, or the other politicians—but you can get at the cop, because he is the official representative of City Hall. LR: To play Devil’s advocate for a minute, a lot of the city officials claim that — one — you’re a vigilante group and you’re dangerous and a lot of your members are in fact ex-criminals, and two — from their experience with the group of Chassidic Jews down in Brooklyn that got together and attacked innocent people, that self-help organizations are inherently dangerous. How do you make sure that the Guardian Angels don’t fullfill these claims? Sliwa: Well, number one, even though the Mayor of New York about a year ago called us vigilantes (that’s probably the one name that comes to mind), even _he_ could never show to the public one time where the Guardian Angels have committed a vigilante act. Number two, in terms of the methods of the Angels and the fact that they might have had criminal records. The first members of the chapter had no records at all. Changing our name from the Magnificent 13 Subway Patrol to the Guardian Angels meant changing policy in three ways. It meant going from three-person patrols to eight-person patrols, with a leader and a secondary leader of each patrol; it meant that no longer were we just going on the subways — we extended our patrols to the parks, streets, senior citizen areas, everywhere and anywhere; and it meant that we were now accepting people who had minor brushes with the law. We do not accept people who have convictions for arson, child abuse, sexual abuse, weapons possession, armed robbery, armed assault, attempted homicide, sale or possession of heroin or cocaine, or burglary with burglar tools. Those are the kinds of crimes for which we will never accept a person. But if the group were only to exist as a conduit for those people who had never had problems with the law, then all we would be establishing, in most communities, is that the goody-goodies become the Guardian Angels and those who’ve had brushes with the law are left to the functions that most young people have, and that is, destructive violence, or just behavior which doesn’t achieve anything. LR: So it’s almost a recovery program for basically good kids who might have done something in their past? Sliwa: Not so much a recovery program, because the great majority of the Guardian Angels have _not_ had brushes with the law. What we’re talking about is that in the course of a young person’s activity, a young person’s hanging out, socializing, from time to time, they run across trouble. Then, being involved in a positive affirmation of people’s personal rights and private property reasserts the value of community service to one another. It’s obviously a much more constructive phase of activity than just standing on the corner sipping from a quart of beer and toking on a joint. What would you rather have that young person doing? LR: What training does a Guardian Angel have to go through? Sliwa: First of all, you have to be recommended by someone who’s already a Guardian Angel. That Guardian Angel, he or she, is putting his or her shirt and beret on the line for that other person, and if in the course of the interview or training, we feel that the person had no business being brought in, we will strip the colors of the person who recommended that person. So, naturally, you’re not going to be bringing in just any Tom, Dick, or Harry. You have to be physically tested. Then there is training in the Penal Code, and in the right of a citizen to make a citizen’s arrest. Now, as of our agreement with the City, and in other chapters around the country, you must be certified in first aid. And you have to have gone through incident-related training, where, either in a park or a secluded part of a train, you are trained in virtually every problem that could possibly exist, from a husband fighting with a wife, to a scene of vandalism, graffiti, attempted robbery — every conceivable problem, and how it is as a Guardian Angel you deal with it. From the public’s point-of-view, the policeman’s point-of-view, the complainant’s point-of-view, the victim’s point-of-view, the witness’s point-of-view. And cor-relate the total picture. LR: What gave you the idea of the Magnificent 13? Sliwa: It wasn’t really an idea; it was just having been involved in volunteer service since the age of 14. I was involved in recycling garbage. At a very young age, awards had been given to me by various public officials—President Nixon, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, then-Mayor John Lindsay. It was an encouragement to get involved in greater areas of volunteer service. The largest area of need, obviously, in our urban areas today is the area of crime. So, my main obligation, I felt, was to develop a volunteer program that helped to deal with the crime that was just proliferating across the city. LR: Sounds like you really go for the slogan, “I Love New York.” You sound like a real believer in this city. Sliwa: Well, more than that. It’s a people program. Because if it was just a New York program, I wouldn’t have bothered to expand it to different cities. What it is, is an epidemic has really engulfed the country, both in the urban areas and the surburban and rural areas. And that’s the indifference of people toward other people—the insensitivity, and the falling away of a time and age when people just normally came to the aid of one another. LR: Do you see other services which have traditionally been recognized as government services provided by similar private organizations? Do you see that as a viable alternative? Sliwa: I’d say it even stronger than that. I’m saying that our political system has failed in many ways. Now I’m not saying, “Replace it with another political system.” What I’m saying is that people have to begin assuming more of the responsibility of their daily lives themselves—as long as it is righteous, lawful, and correct. I’m not saying that people should go out there and start arresting people and trying them, or building subway cars, or beginning different forms of mass transit. But areas that are within human needs—for instance, there’s a pile of shit in front of your house. Instead of breaking your finger dialing all the numbers downtown to get the sanitation department to clean it up, go out there with a shovel and broom and clean it up! If there’s paint that’s needed in your apartment and the landlord isn’t giving it to you, well then, go out and get paint—and then bill your landlord. Do a lot of the self-help things needed, in order to create a better environment in which to live — and then worry about who’s to blame afterward. Don’t point the finger first and expect the thing to get done. LR: So what you’ve done through the Guardian Angels is tap into a spontaneous community desire, people wanting to defend themselves. Sliwa: More so than that. That’s a very good premise, and the thing which you see first off. But it goes much deeper than that. What it is, is utilizing _young people_ who are causing the problems — we’re not talking about the people who become Guardian Angels, but _young people_ in general are the ones causing the problems. Ninety percent of the violent crimes in America are committed by those under the age of 20. Let’s just take New York City. Our group is predominantly Hispanic and black. You ask an average outsider who doesn’t live in New York City who the criminals are, and he’ll say, young blacks and young Hispanics. The idea of blacks and Hispanics is negative—trouble makers, Riker’s Island, the worst dregs of society. What the Guardian Angels have proved is that the minorities in New York City, those that live in the worst crime-infested areas, have actually picked up the ball _first_ and attacked the problem from a self-help point-of-view, without asking for any government help whatsoever. So now we’re giving pride to any ethnic group or any minority group or any oppressed group, showing them, “Yes you can make a contribution and not just always be the receptor, or the third or fourth. You can actually be the _pioneers_ of that movement.”