No Guardian Angels

Anyone who wants to be our guardian is certainly no angel.

The “guardian angels” began in New York city in 1979 and now operate in eighty cities in nine countries. It is hard to explain what this group actually does except raise money and walk around in red jackets and berets, enhancing ‘community safety’.

They have had trouble expanding into Canada. The police and the mayor of Toronto puffed that “policing should be done by the police”. But it is also hard to understand what the police actually do that is of any use to society.

The extremely hostile reaction to the angels in most of the country reveals something about the Canadian mentality. Some people huff about ‘vigilantism”. Whatever they are, the guardian angels do not seem to be vigilantes in the true sense of the term.

There are always people who want to be guardians over others, and people who think they want to be guarded over. The latter usually do not know what they really want. Figuring it out takes them where they do not want to go.

St. Lawrence neighbourhood, Toronto

At a recent meeting of the St. Lawrence neighbourhood council, some members of the council proposed inviting the angels to attend and speak to the next meeting. This provoked a severe reaction; one member blustered that he would resign if the council heard these ‘vigilantes’.

Another member delivered the old whine; “what is wrong with just hearing what they have to say?” The idea was voted down by a large but not overwhelming majority and the ‘leaders’ of St. Lawrence moved frantically to bury a ‘potentially divisive issue”.

St. Lawrence is a compact and fairly prosperous neighbourhood surrounded by some very poor areas. It has a collective self image of progressiveness. Most of the neighbourhood council abhor the ‘nimbyism’ of nearby neighbourhood councils. They are in the double bind of wanting a ‘decent’ solution to the homelessness problem, but also of being afraid of the homeless.

Dundas strip, Toronto

A little north on Sherbourne from St. Lawrence you come to the Dundas corner. No one can even come up with a name for this area which would not be ridiculous. It is a very poor area; the psychiatric patients discharged into the street drift there. The drug and prostitution business operates there because it is less interfered with. Much crime and violence happens there.

There, the Guardian Angels were able to recruit and train the first wave of volunteers in their attempt to start once again in Toronto. But when they rented the meeting room of the Toronto Housing building at Sherbourne and Dundas to hold the graduation ceremony, the city housing bureaucracy heard of it and pounced. The Angels had to hold their ceremony in a nearby park.

It seems to have been the residents of the area’s numerous social housing buildings who requested the angels to come and ‘organise’ them. They thought the angels could do ‘something’ for them.

angels on the web

Go to http://www.guardianangels.org/ and download your own high res photo of an egomaniac. Curtis Sliwa founded the angels in 1979 in New York. He thought the cops were not doing enough to stop violence on the subways.

Sliwa trained his original group, the ‘magnificent thirteen’, to make ‘citizen’s arrests’. Two were killed; one by police, one by a ‘gang member’.

Sliwa has admitted during these early years to making up stories to attract attention to his group. Revealingly, he lied that police forced him into a cruiser while trying to discourage him and his group.

This has caused some problems for him lately. He is a witness for the prosecution of a prominent mafia gangster. He claims the mafia had him attacked with a base ball bat in 1992, and then shot in a taxi cab. He has the scars to prove this.

Sliwa’s business has grown. He has learned that for unarmed and under-trained people to intervene in a violent crime is unwise. He cannot operate these safety patrols without patrons among local politicians, as well as funders.

Sliwa is selling security, or a feeling of security. His organisation offers courses in classroom violence prevention and classroom behaviour management techniques, gang recognition, and even ‘diversity and cultural awareness”.

He has developed the ‘cyberangels’ to guard the internet from pedophiles, cyberstalkers, identity thieves, etc. He is also a long time talk radio host with a “populist conservative” point of view.

tough sell in Canada

Guardian Angels do not thrive in Canada. A chapter existed in Toronto from 1982 to 1984. An attempt was made to revive it in 1992 in Parkdale. People from that neighbourhood recall that the angels were accosting people on the sidewalks and demanding to know what they were doing in the area.

The head of Guardian Angels in Canada is Lou Hoffer of Toronto. He is said to be a retired policeman and to be driven nearly broke trying to establish the angels. People seem intimidated from joining in Toronto. Nobody seems interested in joining in Vancouver. Only in Calgary, where the mayor is interested in it, does it have a little traction.

A campaign is now reported to be working through all three levels of government to get the angels out of Canada and keep them out. This seems to come out of an elite opinion in Canada that the police should have a monopoly over policing, in contrast to American attitudes.

One positive comment on the angels in the states is that they give the official police some ‘competition’. The cops ‘smarten up’ and ‘remember who they are working for’.

Canadian attitudes

Canadians, especially ones from southern Ontario, are noted for a ‘deference to authority’. There is no good explanation of what this means but many theories about how it came about. It is an automatic trust of authority figures which is not founded upon fact but on ingrained belief and lack of knowledge.

Rationalism, the idea that there is a ‘reason’ which is not subjective to a particular individual or group mentality, is the big flaw in the middle Canadian mind. It believes it can get what they want out of the police if they put their requests through the ‘democratic’ political process ‘reasonably’.

To explain this properly will be another article, but in Canada, especially Ontario, we do not live in a democracy. We live under a legal and governmental system designed by colonial administrators to make governing the population easier by letting them govern themselves, but which can override us at any time.

Canada is a safe, peaceful,efficient, free and uncorrupted place only in comparison to most places south of our border, and not relative to most developed nations. The political and especially the legal institutions of Canada are deeply antidemocratic.

Yet middle class Canadians generally assume that ‘their’ police and courts are working in the way they expect; that is, ‘protecting’ them. If they experience something else, they assume it is a temporary or local aberration; a ‘few bad apples’.

order and law

Many critics of the Toronto police note that they tend to act like an occupying army. That means, their concern is with protecting themselves and “controlling the streets”. They are contemptuous of the ‘law’ and the legal system they are theoretically an adjunct to. They will tolerate no ‘civilian’ or judicial interference in doing whatever they please.

Not only the police services board, but the chief of police and his staff have no control over the Toronto police. But all these cops must be under the control of something. And it is odd that they let these private security firms lead them by the nose.

It has always been much like this. The original Toronto police were not wanted by the frontier community, they were imposed. They were an adjunct of the British garrison; an occupation army. The city has always had to pay for their upkeep, but has never had the slightest influence on them. The judiciary has no control over the police, either.

There are no tools by which the population can regulate the police if they decide not to be regulated. They can kill at will. Restraining them will first require a radical restructuring of the country’s political and legal arrangements.

guarding the guardians

Those on the St. Lawrence council who want to give the guardian angels a try and those who want to run them out of town have something in common. They think the police should be protecting ‘the community’. They can not distinguish ‘community interests’ from what they see as their own interests. In effect, the police are supposed to ‘serve and protect’ their interests.

Here we put our finger on the ‘something’ which the guardian angels have to sell; a way of giving the official police “competition” and making them responsive to those who have formed a successful angels chapter. It is the ‘create an alternative’ approach to influencing power, in contrast to the ‘work through the political process’ approach aggressively favoured by the St. Lawrence majority.

This ‘political process’ majority in St. Lawrence will continue to believe they can get the ‘something’ they want out of the police if they put their requests through the democratic process ‘reasonably’. They can not get anywhere when they do not really know what they want from police, and completely misunderstand what police and the law are.

This majority seems unaware that St. Lawrence is already controlled by a vigilante-like group. Most well off neighbourhoods in the east down town of Toronto have a private security firm which seems to have been granted a monopoly by the local business improvement district. In St. Lawrence it is Nexxus. In Cabbage town it is Intelligarde. The police sanction this as a way of maintaining ‘surveillance’, which they have decided they will never have enough men for.

Guardian angels will only march in Toronto if those who have real influence on the police decide they need to give the police some ‘incentive’. The ‘political process’ people will never get the ‘something’ which they want from the police, and will not get anything except what the police and those who have real control over it decide to concede.

unrealistic expectations

The progressive and rational, middle class and middle aged people who run St. Lawrence neighbourhood council are not happy with the Toronto police. These are the people who think police should have university educations and be ‘social workers with guns’.

Police cannot solve social problems; they cannot substitute for effective government. Police can protect nobody from violence; they arrive after the violence occurs. Often they are the violence.

Yet some members of the St. Lawrence community, who help publish the community newspaper, say police work is a ‘calling’ suitable only for people of a special character. Perhaps they will find these godlike people on other planets, because there are not enough of them on this one. Such people would be quickly hounded out of any police force by the other cops.

One can understand why the local police division are unwilling to send a senior officer to each and every meeting of the St. Lawrence community council. They say they will come if they have someone free and if there is anything to report.

Much of the council are indignant about this. They have the strange idea that the cops are part of the government apparatus, like the local councillor, M.P., and M.M.P., whom they expect to send a representative to all their meetings. The cops should be ‘accountable’ to them in the same way.


Police will not be protectors and they will not be social workers with guns. No sensible person really wants this; it gives the police vast power which, given the limitations of human nature, is sure to be abused. Social workers with gavels is a better idea.

Other than arrest people and deal with emergencies, most of what police legitimately engage in is mediating disputes over use of public space. The attitude of police is generally that they do not want to be involved in this.
Regardless of what some legal theorists say, the police station is the worst place to settle such disputes.

The best place to settle them would be a court, but the courts are very restricted in Canada, whatever the rantings of proponents of more power for police, that courts are too powerful. Our courts can only deal with what is put before them, they cannot investigate, and they are very hard to access.

Were there a system of courts in this country to deal with minor complaints, with the power to make decisions about them, much of the need for police would be eliminated. Such courts, operating all day and every day in every district of the city, would be cheaper than police. The magistrates could deal with disputes in a much more detached and objective way than any cop.

This will end much of the abuse of police power, as police would have to take someone they arrest directly before the magistrate, and justify the arrest in the arrestees presence. Cells would be removed from police stations.

better ways

All the above would make the homeless and marginalised more secure, as well as the ‘citizen’. Official police, or guardian angel type groups, can not do that. There is little any ‘guardian’ or ‘policeman’ can do to ameliorate crime and homelessness, however much they try to manipulate people’s perceptions of the problem in order to make themselves appear indispensable.

The solution to these problems is; first, more effective government than we now have, which can better provide for social needs. Second, a more useful legal system which can resolve disputes about use of public space before they lead to unpleasantness.

When solutions to social problems are too big for small people, they start looking for magical ‘solutions’. They look for false protectors, or they try to bargain the problems away.

To see the real problems and the real solutions requires people to grow bigger.