EDMONTON DOESN'T NEED GUARDIANS

What to make of the Guardian Angels, a band of volunteers wearing red
berets who want to patrol a city's streets to prevent crime and make
their own arrests? A group wishing to help police, regardless of
whether the police wish for that help?

The model might work in crime-infested U.S. cities like Detroit and
Miami, or in the New York of the group's 1980s heyday. But
intervening Angels serve little purpose in a city like ours where
crime does not overwhelm police, and where officers have their own
ways to engage and empower the community.

Edmonton's mayor and police chief rejected the group's offer to start
a chapter here, but founder Curtis Sliwa was successful on his other
Alberta stop. Calgary Mayor David Bronconnier welcomed the Angels'
assistance, while police brass was understandably wary of the group's
policy of forcibly detaining wrongdoers.

Canadian laws do allow citizen's arrest, but exercising this power
should not be encouraged among volunteers trained or accredited only
by Guardian Angels themselves. (Their training program runs for three
months and includes first aid, legal rights and martial arts.)

This idea of a police role for private citizens beyond the more
passive Neighbourhood Watch model is most troubling. Ultimately
accountable to no one, their "safety patrol" would have a distinct
whiff of vigilantism. While the group says no volunteer has ever been
convicted of a crime while on patrol, there remains the inherent risk
that someone will get hurt when criminal behaviour and informal
security training clash.

A crime-fighting group which works without the cooperation of actual
police will be useless at best, disruptive at worst. Despite having
been refused in February in Toronto -- and after two failed chapters
since 1982 -- a former officer there is enlisting and training a crew
of several dozen Angels, anyhow. Applying the same approach to
Edmonton stands only to frustrate the professional officers' work.

When the Angels hold press conferences in a city which does not want
them, they merely draw attention to themselves and sow public
cynicism about crime and police. Angels' head Sliwa is a popular
radio host in New York, and knows how to sling media-friendly lines.
Sliwa called the York Hotel a "cesspool of degenerate criminal
activity ... they should take a wrecking ball to it."

The inner city's "skid row" is where "zombies walk around cracked-out
on meth right in front of police headquarters." In his sound bite
world, drug use in downtown Calgary amounts to "Amsterdam in Alberta."

Sliwa's reputation still suffers from his 1992 admission that he
fabricated a few Angels heroics from 1978 to 1980 to bolster his then
young group's credibility.

If crime in Edmonton was rampant and out-of-control beyond the realm
of radio-host zingers, perhaps Angels would be useful. If in their
community policing model, city police themselves were not working the
streets in high-crime areas and engaging the public, or if
Neighbourhood Watch didn't already empower volunteers to assist and
co-operate with police, there might be room for Angels' services.

But in reality, more front line professionals are the better answer.