The Angels Are Back--for Better or Worse

The police car squealed to a quick stop. The policewoman rolled down the window and yelled to a band of Guardian Angels: “Hey! We need your help in detaining a Latino male. He’s dressed in white. He just beat up somebody. If you see him, hold him until we get there.”

And with that, the eight Angels rushed off in different directions through the Gaslamp Quarter. They patrolled darkened alleyways near the convention center. They sauntered through portions of 7th Avenue near G and Market that looked fit for no one, let alone a bunch of guys, each under 6 feet tall, armed with nothing more than a red beret. An hour later, the search ended. The “suspect” had not turned up.

The Guardian Angels are back.

They are 39 men and one woman, all in their 20s, stalking the streets of San Diego on what they call a voluntary “safety patrol.”

The Angels now number more than 7,000 members in 73 cities around the world, including Great Britain and Australia. Everywhere they go, they invite controversy: Is their policy of patrolling mean city streets and making “citizens’ arrests” a help or a hindrance to police?

Are they a “visual deterrent to crime,” which they offer up as the reason for their existence? Or are they, as critics suggest, a paramilitary cult attractive to men in their 20s?

Curtis Sliwa, who managed a McDonald’s restaurant on one of the meanest streets in the Bronx, started the inaugural chapter of the Angels in 1979 in New York City. Sliwa said he conceived them as a band “of unarmed, volunteer crime fighters.”

The local group shows up for work every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night at a former branch office of the Security Pacific National Bank at 5th Avenue and E Street. Weston Conwell, regional coordinator of the Angels’ local chapter, said the space was donated by the Horton Park Plaza Hotel, which owns the building.

Howard Meacham, who runs the hotel, said he’s providing the site rent-free on a month-to-month basis.

“I think Weston is a fine young man, and I think the group as a whole is positive,” Meacham said. “Crime is rampant down here, just awful, the drug dealing especially. Our hotel has been broken into. We’ve had vandalism done to cars, ours and our

guests’. We even had a computer stolen. We’ve had muggings and at least one case of assault and battery. The police seem to be doing all they can. The police are overwhelmed.”

Nevertheless, Meacham has no plans to give money to the Angels; nor, apparently, does anyone else in the business community. The group is now funded with its own dollars; Conwell acknowledges that money is tight. Even Meacham said he hopes to have the site rented in the next few months.

Asked his concerns about the Angels, he paused and said, “That’s an interesting question . . . and I’d rather not comment.”

This is not the Angels’ first appearance in San Diego. Conwell said the previous tenure lasted from 1982 until 1985. The death of Scott Stapley, the former leader who was murdered by a serial killer in Northern California, caused the Angels’ earlier breakup, he said. (Conwell said the murder was unrelated to Angel activities.)

As a former member, Conwell said, he “reconvened” the group, now in its fourth month of what he called “the redux phase.”

Police Also Guarded

As always with the Angels, here and elsewhere, reaction is mixed. The business community seems to welcome any deterrent to vandalism and drugs, but doesn’t seem willing to fund the group with any kind of collective punch. The attitude, as one local shop owner put it, is optimism “tempered by wait and see.”

Official police response is, at best, equally guarded.

“They don’t advise us, and we don’t advise them,” said Lt. Greg Clark, who sometimes deals with the Angels in his work with the San Diego Police Department. “They’re a citizens group that chooses to be out and visible at night in the downtown area. Their powers are no more or no less than that of any citizen on the street. We’ve had little complaint--or really any reaction about them--from anybody.”

Told that a police officer had solicited the Angels’ help in apprehending a suspect, Clark said: “If it did happen, and I’m not saying it didn’t, I can’t comment on it. We as police officers would not give out direct assignments, and if an officer did, that would be inappropriate.”

Asked whether the presence of the Angels is a good or a bad idea, Clark said: “Anybody that wants to help curtail crime is helpful. If they are there, and their presence stops crime, that is helpful.

“But my fear is that such a group will overstep its boundaries and violate somebody’s rights. I’m not saying it happens with the Angels, I’m just saying it could happen.”

Are the Angels a help or a hindrance?

Clark sighed and said, “To be honest, they’ve been neither.”

At 7:37 p.m. last Friday, Weston Conwell was prepping a force of seven men and one woman for active duty. They lined up horizontally, military-style. They peered at their leader with rigid, Marine-like intensity.

“We need desks and chairs, and we need them soon,” Conwell, 22, barked out in a crisp, staccato voice. “By the way, tomorrow night is Street Scene (last weekend’s downtown music festival). Watch the cars. You can never be too leery, you can never get too close. Street Scene will have its own security detail, so don’t interfere, don’t overlap where it isn’t necessary.”

Conwell was speaking in the lobby of the bank building, bare except for a cluttered desk, a computer, a telephone and a set of weight-lifting equipment. About a dozen Christian tracts lined the counter top.

Each of the Angels wore a white T-shirt, a red beret and black pants and boots in keeping with the paramilitary look. The mood of the group was serious, almost comically so. Their adherence to Conwell seemed to border on evangelical devotion.

Code Names and Rituals

Placards and crude art were scattered around the lobby:

“We’re Behind You President Bush Give the Drug Dealers the Push.”

“Give Us Playgrounds Not Killing Fields.”

“Turn to Yourself Not Drugs.”

“Help Us Shut Down the Drug Lords.”

A note from one Angel to another read: “Snake, here is the phone list. Give me a call, Eagle.”

The Angels often go by code names, and, upon leaving or entering their headquarters, each bows as part of a ritual called a dojo: a kind of martial arts salute.

Conwell said he was born in San Luis Obispo but moved to San Diego as a child. He said he was expelled from Clairemont High School “for being a bad kid” and then graduated from San Diego High. His father is an architect, his mother an employee for an insurance planning company, he said.

Seen the Light

Many of the Angels are “bad kids” who have seen “the error of their ways” and want to do something about drugs and crime, Conwell said. “About 10%” of the local membership is composed of servicemen who feel the government, particularly the police, takes too cavalier an attitude toward crime.

Conwell said he teaches sixth-graders in the Cuyamaca area for the San Diego County Office of Education. A spokeswoman for that office said Conwell is known officially as “an outdoor education program specialist,” as opposed to a teacher, and works with children “in a camp environment.” He listed woodcarving as one of the things he teaches.

Conwell declined to name the location of the camp, saying he feared the children would be at risk if criminals knew his whereabouts. He does have a flair for drama.

“When we came here four months ago, the drug dealers loitered around the front door of the headquarters here,” he said. “And now they don’t--never! They’re scared to. They wouldn’t dare.”

What’s the No. 1 problem with which the Angels come in contact in San Diego?

“Drugs,” he said, spitting out the word as if it were a food he couldn’t tolerate. “Mainly crack. Crack is the one. Crack is the villain. And now we’re dealing with ice. Ice supposedly enhances the effect of the drug, making the high last 40% longer. Crack and ice are our enemies.”

‘No Room for Skinheads’

Conwell said the Guardian Angels occasionally receive calls from individuals who identify themselves as Skinheads and make threats--threats Conwell did not spell out.

“Skinheads are the lowest form of scum I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing,” he said. “There’s no room in San Diego for Skinheads!”

To what extent are Conwell and his troops a bunch of overgrown kids playing Army on the streets of the nation? Do the Angels in any way resemble a paramilitary cult?

He seemed to welcome such questions.

“We are not a cult, and we’re not vigilantes,” he said. “We are vigilant, but we do not take the law into our own hands. We’re an extra set of eyes and ears for the police. And we do a damn good job.”

Dr. Sheldon Zablow is a local psychiatrist who has studied cults and counseled cult members. He said his reaction is “more that of a lay person than a professional. The Guardian Angels seem to be more about PR (public relations) than anything,” Zablow said. “Like anyone, I would welcome someone making our streets safe. But guys doing it more for publicity than anything else may actually make the streets less safe.

“So they walk around the park a couple of times and then leave. By creating an illusion of safety, they may make things worse. I think the best deterrent to crime is to learn that there is safety in numbers and that it’s wise not to set yourself up as a victim,” Zablow said.

Conwell said the risk of his own involvement in the Angels is “losing my fiancee. I never have a social life. I can’t take a night off; there’s too much work to do! Just look at the crime out there! My fiancee hates this stuff. She’s not even speaking to me now.”

Conwell said the objective of the Angels is “to act as a visual deterrent against crime.” He quoted a study by the San Diego Assn. of Governments that notes decreases in crime in areas patrolled by the Angels for a period of three months or longer.

On a “walk-along” Friday night that lasted several hours, no confrontations between members of the Angels and potential lawbreakers took place.

On four occasions, however, passers-by told the Angels of purported crimes occurring less than a block away, and in each instance, the members declined to check it out.

Two women approached them near the California Theatre on 4th Avenue and told them a woman was being threatened by a man who claimed to be her husband. She needed an escort back to her hotel, the women said. The Angels chose not to provide one or to venture over to talk to the woman.

Worried About Ambush

“That’s considered a domestic event,” said Mitch Oppmann, 22, then acting as group leader. “And we would be going on a hunch. In such cases, who really knows the truth? If he hit her and we saw it, maybe we could do something. But what if we take her to her room and she yells rape and we get accused? Or what if it’s an ambush? Who needs four dead Angels?”

Oppmann said he works as a computer technician who “just got tired of too much crime” on the streets. John Crouse, 24, came to San Diego from Texas 3 1/2 years ago. He lives in a downtown hotel, like many of the wayward souls he meets on the street, and works by day as a janitor. He said he got into the Angels to “feel important,” in the manner of a public servant or a guardian of individual liberty.

“I joined when I read about a 13-year-old who got shot for wearing the wrong-colored shirt,” Crouse said bitterly.

“When you first get in,” Oppmann said, “sure, you feel like a junior Rambo. That’s part of the thrill. And maybe some of us are wanna-bes. But Rambo lasts for about a week and then you start realizing what dangerous thinking that is. If you keep thinking that way, you’ll get killed. The glamour wears off pretty quick.”

The Angels are magnets for comment: compliments and chuckles, taunts and abuses--they’re either hurled face-to-face or shouted from passing cars.

An elderly man in a wheelchair said: “All right, here are the boys! Get all the druggies off the street, will you?”

“Thanks for making our streets safer,” beamed a man walking by.

“Hey, you lousy . . . “ yelled a man in a passing car. “Get off the . . . street.”

A carload of young men flashed a gang sign, shouted an obscenity, then sped away, burning rubber on the pavement.

Frightening Moment

Conwell said that one Angel has been “wounded” in the past four months. He suffered a cut by “some guy who had a knife.” He said the group’s scariest confrontation came when 40 people surrounded six Angels in front of a bar.

“We held them off until the police came, because we learn how to handle such mobs from our training in the martial arts,” he said. “Believe it or not, six can hold off 40.”

Police Lt. Clark said he worries about the Angels getting hurt or immersing themselves in conflicts beyond their control. Conwell said the risks are worth it.

“We as citizens have to put a stop to crime,” he said. “It is our duty, which America must wake up to. We as Angels are without sex, race, religion. We have no political views whatsoever. We are neither Democrat or Republican.

“All we care about is stopping crime. And that’s got to count for something in a city where the mayor cares more about Faberge eggs than she does about blotting out lawlessness. . . . Well, now, doesn’t it?”