Downtown robberies, graffiti bring crime talks to the fore
But Town Board members expressed skepticism about the Guardian Angels at last Wednesday’s meeting and, for the most part, that skepticism remained even after the graffiti incident and downtown robbery. They questioned whether the group’s presence is truly needed and whether it sends visitors the wrong message: that Riverhead isn’t a welcoming place.
Councilman George Gabrielsen said he still hasn’t gotten his questions answered and feels the town should do a background check on the group. He also feels the Town Board should have approval over whether to let the Guardian Angels patrol.
“You’re empowering them,” he said, adding that this could present liability issues for the town.
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While Councilman Jim Wooten and Councilwoman Jodi Giglio also remain opposed, Councilman John Dunleavy said, “We’ll have to see what happens.”
“I’m not going to say they’re no good,” he continued. “I’m going to say that any help we can get is better.”
Despite the crimes at Barth’s and TrueTech, Mr. Dunleavy said, “I really don’t think we have as much crime as everybody thinks we do.”
Ultimately, it may not matter if the board wants the Angels to come to town or not. They’re volunteers and the board can’t restrict them from organizing, Mr. Walter has said.
According to a News-Review analysis of Riverhead’s criminal statistics released last year, the number of crimes reported in 2013 (the most recent year for which figures are available) was actually the lowest it had been in a decade.
The most recent data, from 2014, has still not been made public. That data would have included a string of robberies and assaults that took place last year along Railroad Avenue, most of them targeting Hispanic men and homeless people.
The most recent publicly available crime data is in a monthly report from seven months ago.
Mr. Sliwa told the News-Review that the four Town Board members who expressed surprise last week that the Angels were planning to patrol Riverhead must have been in “hibernation” not to know about it.
“We’ve been talking about this on a regular basis,” Mr. Sliwa said. “I understand the nature of politics, where you say anything in the final days of a campaign. But unless they’re willing to go down and patrol the railroad station themselves, I don’t see what their alternative is — or if they even have an alternative.”
The Guardian Angels’ involvement on the North Fork began late last fall, when the group began patrolling Greenport after a gang-related shooting incident in Southold.
Despite this, Southold Town Police Chief Martin Flatley says he’s never seen them.
“In all honesty, I have read in the online media that they have conducted patrols, but I have not seen them or had any contact with the Guardian Angels,” he wrote in an email. “They never established a line of communication with our department to forward any information that they may have gathered from the community when they were formed. I have not heard of any interaction with our officers that patrol Greenport Village either, which is apparently where they conduct their patrols.”
Mr. Sliwa said the Guardian Angels have about 12 volunteers in Greenport and that they were recruited from the immigrant communities there.
According to Mr. Sliwa, they have “just about finished their training” at this point and are being led by a Greenport resident and native El Salvadoran named Gabriel Gonzalez, who lived in Riverhead for five years. Both Mr. Gonzalez and a supervisor sent from the Guardian Angels’ New York City office will “work hand in hand on Riverhead with the cooperation of the police.”
As far as the Angels’ lack of visibility in Greenport goes, Mr. Sliwa said, “The police are not necessarily cognizant of what’s going on because there’s a language barrier. Nearly all of our volunteers are bilingual.”
Unlike the police, Mr. Sliwa said, “we do what nobody else does, that I know of. We specifically go into the immigrant community and we try to empower them.”
The Guardian Angels have branches in 18 countries and 130 cities and not all of those locations want the group to have the same level of activity. Some just want them to report what they see, while others want them to intervene or even detain suspects until police arrive, Mr. Sliwa said.
“In Greenport, to this point, we have not had to detain anybody for arrests but we’ve broken up a lot of fights, disputes and arguments that might normally escalate into fights,” Mr. Sliwa said. “Generally, no one else is going to jump in and break up the fight otherwise.”
