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Guardian Angels: A Unique Approach to Crime Prevention
Abstract
The Guardian Angels represent a form of citizen crime prevention that has fostered interest and concern regarding the group's impact, motives, leadership, and organizational structure. Led by their founder, Curtis Sliwa, these volunteers patrol the streets and subways in over 50 cities. The purpose of this exploratory study was to document the activities of the Angels, assess their impact on crime and citizen fear of crime, and describe features of the group that differentiate it from other citizen patrols. Recent research suggests that citizen patrols may reduce crime and make citizens feel safe by imposing social order. Study findings suggest that Angels may not reduce the violent offenses they seek to prevent, although they may have limited impact on property crimes. Segments of the population feel safe when Angels patrol, which may be associated with the Angels performing an order-maintenance role. Sliwa's efforts to mobilize minority youth to be positive role models is a unique feature of the Angels. Ultimately, the effectiveness of the Angels may depend on the extent to which Sliwa can seek rapprochement with law enforcement and community leaders.
... While the focus and presence of patrols, community safety education programs and service, brings RLSH into comparison with traditional volunteer efforts, many volunteer groups suffer from a lack of stability and continuity (Grossbard, 2009;Pennell, Curtis, Henderson, & Tayman, 1989;Wong, Chui, & Kwok, 2011). Despite strong efforts to maintain their numbers in the form of administration, internal and external funding, government, police, and community support, volunteer groups experience low recruitment and retention. ...
... A 2009 report on the Australian Neighborhood Watch, suggested that the organization could become extinct in 25 years (Grossbard, 2009). Similarly, within the Guardian Angel movement, there is evidence of a lack of continual motivation and membership retention (Pennell et al., 1989). This is true particularly in the face of walking patrols, which many consider boring or unpleasant and report receiving verbal abuse (Pennell et al., 1989). ...
... Similarly, within the Guardian Angel movement, there is evidence of a lack of continual motivation and membership retention (Pennell et al., 1989). This is true particularly in the face of walking patrols, which many consider boring or unpleasant and report receiving verbal abuse (Pennell et al., 1989). This is in stark contrast to the growing size of RLSH, where, patrolling, in costume, is a prominent and regular activity. ...
The Real Life Superhero (RLSH) subculture is a growing global community of individuals who adopt the superhero motif and are motivated by prosocial goals. Although the community has been the focus of documentaries, news articles and numerous internet forums, little academic research has been conducted on the composition of this subculture. Through the use of an online survey, socio-demographic information about this community was collected. This data was compiled and analysed via qualitative means to develop not only an overarching review of the composition of the subculture but also how members perceived themselves and other members. Membership and identity within the community was strongly tied to the activities and focus of each member, predominantly community and crime prevention orientated. The study identified a high degree of heterogeneity within the community with subdivisions focused on the perceptions of legal boundaries, focus of activities and level of authenticity. © 2016, Daniel White, Marianna Szabo, Niko Tiliopoulos, Paul Rhodes, Scott Griffiths, and Nova Southeastern University.
... This paper, however, pays attention to the persistence of non-paid citizen involvement in matters of local safety and security, a development which started to attract intellectual attention from the 1970s and 1980s onwards (e.g., Pennell et al., 1989;Rosenbaum, 1987;Yin et al., 1977). It is only recently that such attention has culminated in a real wave of empirical studies on the role of citizen patrols, neighbourhood watches and other forms of active citizenship in both Dutch and British community safety (Bullock, 2014;Butcher, 2019;Lub, 2018a;Schreurs, 2019;van der Land, 2014;van Steden, 2018;van Steden et al., 2011;Westall, 2019). ...
... This brings us to the final and most sensitive topic: just like vigilante neighbourhood watches (Pennell et al., 1989), digital crime prevention is not without unpleasant 'moral implications' (Lub, 2018b) of stigmatisation, ethnic profiling and excessive social control. Mols and Pridmore (2019) argue that WNCP groups can potentially diverge from their intended civic and civil purposes, derailing in ambiguous, not to say reprehensible, directions. ...
WhatsApp Neighbourhood Crime Prevention (WNCP) groups are popular in the Netherlands. As a basic assumption, this kind of digital neighbourhood watch could prevent crime, but what is the evidence? Drawing on a mixture of qualitative research and a review of additional publications, we conclude that WNCP groups stimulate social cohesion rather than prevent crime. We reach our conclusion by applying the evaluation EMMIE framework – an acronym for Effect, Mechanisms, Moderators, Implementation and Economics – to the available data. A point for further discussion is the limited scope of the economic dimension. Moral costs must be calculated, too, as WNCP groups tend to deepen divisions between groups of citizens and fuel exclusionary practices in the name of community safety.
... The main path of the citation network had the highest total weight and consisted of 18 nodes, each representing a study. Pennell et al. [23] assessed the effects of the Guardian Angels Program (i.e., volunteers patrolling the streets and subways) on crime and citizens' attitude toward crime; order maintenance policing helped prevent crime and made citizens feel safe. Bennett and Lavrakas [24] proposed a community-based crime prevention program to eliminate the fear of crime and other problems but did not observe any changes in crimes or perceived quality of life. ...
This study performed main path analysis to explore the academic field of crime prevention. Studies were collected from the Web of Science database, and main path analysis was used to analyze the studies and identify influential authors and journals on the basis of the g-index and h-index. Cluster analysis was then performed to group studies with related themes. Wordle was used to output keywords and word clouds for each cluster, both of which were used as reference to name each cluster. Five clusters were identified, namely crime displacement control, crime prevention through environmental design, developmental crime prevention, the effects of communalism on crime prevention, and the effect of childhood sexual abuse on crime. Each cluster was analyzed, and suggestions based on the results are provided. The main purpose of crime prevention is to advance our understanding of the psychological criminal mechanisms (i.e., personal, social and environmental impacts) associated with different criminal behaviors at the intersection of law by using main path analysis.
... Lorsqu'une évaluation a effectivement pu être menée à son terme, ses résultats se sont avérés similaires à ceux qui ont été obtenus dans le cas des applications orthodoxes du modèle. C'est ainsi que le groupe parapolicier qui s'appelait les Anges gardiens (Guardian Angels) a fait l'objet d'une évaluation rigoureuse (Pennell, Curtis, Henderson et Tagman, 1989). Cette évaluation a révélé que l'action des « anges » ne produisait pas de diminution de la criminalité dans le métro, où ils sont déployés. ...
Late 1970s New York, rife with fear of crime and low trust in government to keep people safe, was a fertile ground for civilian public safety activism, which channeled people’s anger at the city’s situation into action to change it. The Guardian Angels and Women Against Pornography (WAP) were two of the best-known examples of this trend. Though rarely taken up together, this article places them in dialogue with one another in order to examine how racial, gender, sexual, and economic anxieties influenced the perception and possibilities of anti-violence community organizations at this time. I argue that while the predominately young, male, and nonwhite Angels were seen as belligerent, WAP’s adherence to the state’s social norms of acceptable female activism and sexual reformism facilitated their broader acceptance. The same social hierarchies that colored perceptions of the two organizations also shaped the available sources of partnerships, legitimacy, and funding, incentivizing both groups to undermine the most radically inclusive aspects of their missions in order to secure the resources they needed to continue operating most effectively.
Relentless fiscal pressures faced by the public police over the last few decades have meant that police organisations have had to find new ways to obtain and harness the resources needed to achieve their goals. Through entering into relationships of coercion, commercial exchange, and gift with a wide variety of external institutions and individuals operating in both public and private capacities, police organisations have risen to this challenge. Indeed, police organisations are increasingly operating within a business paradigm. But what are the benefits of these relationships and the nature of the risks that might accompany reliance upon them? This book examines these new modes of exchange between police and 'outsiders' and explores how far these relationships can be taken before certain fundamental values - equity in the distribution of policing, cost-effectiveness in the delivery of police services, and the legitimacy of the police institution itself - are placed in jeopardy.
Real Life Superheroes (RLSH) create unique superhero personas and engage in a variety of community-based activities, including street patrols with the stated purpose of responding to and deterring crime. Prior research on RLSH explored the psychological motivations for participating in the subculture, engaging concepts such as edgework and extreme altruism, while also avoiding framing RLSH as vigilantes. Most RLSH reject the vigilante label, even though the community recognizes vigilante traditions as a precursor to the contemporary movement and cites popular vigilante superheroes as influences. In this study, we apply a criminological conceptualization of vigilantism through an analysis of RLSH interviews and social media posts over a two-year period. Based on this framework, RLSH activity classifies as vigilantism despite declarations of community outreach and activism. We also identified themes of extreme altruism and communal narcissism in our data and provide observations about RLSH messaging during the pandemic.
This article explores grassroots practices of community safety and security in Brooklyn, New York through a framework that centers the abolitionist practices imbedded in Black neighborhood collective action. Literature on safety and security often conflates the two concepts, not considering how grounded applications of the two may produce different outcomes and approaches to community well-being. Additionally, we know little about how Black communities build safety and security from the ground up. And while academic scholarship on abolition provides a robust theoretical foundation, more examples of how communities could and do employ police abolition are needed. Utilizing archival research and oral history interviews, I argue that a crisis of police legitimacy compelled alternatives to formal policing in New York City during the urban crisis, or the postwar period of massive urban divestment and hyper-ghettoization. These efforts included masculinized security practices such as neighborhood patrols and protests, while community safety practices included forms of neighborhood sociality grounded in feminized and queer relationships of care and concern. These efforts, which critiqued institutional racism and neglect and emerged from the indigenous knowledge base and social networks of community members, provide considerations for recovering abolitionist practices in Black neighborhood collective action and implications for building alternatives to policing. This article contributes to literature on Black communities, collective action, and abolition by offering an intersectional analysis of the various ways Black social and political engagement centers on practices of safety and security and does not always fixate on conscripting a police response.
Delinquency is a broad term covering a variety of antisocial acts committed by juveniles. It includes such diverse acts as robbery, sexual assault, drug use, vandalism, and underage drinking. Many delinquent acts are illegal for both adults and juveniles. Status offenses, in contrast, are acts that are only illegal for juveniles. Examples of the latter include underage drinking, skipping school, and running away from home. From a behavioral point of view, delinquency proneness is best conceived of as a general characteristic that youths have to a greater or lesser degree (Farrington, 1987). Serious delinquents engage in a variety of crimes and status offenses rather than specialize in any one type (Farrington, 1992; M. Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990). This chapter summarizes information describing the nature and extent, prevention, and treatment of delinquent behavior.
Crime prevention strategies often aim at changing the motivations and predispositions of offenders. A new approach has developed within the last dec ade which focuses on changing the behavior of potential victims. The authors explore the theoretical foundations of the new strategies for reducing crime, commonly known as community crime prevention. They suggest that the in novation is a result of a major shift in the research paradigm for studying the effects of crime. The orientation underlying community crime prevention is labeled the "victimization perspective." Following a description of some limitations in that perspective, the authors offer, as an alternative, a perspective oriented toward social control. The social control perspective, which is based on the empirical findings of several recently completed research projects, offers a theoretical foundation both for a fresh approach to the study of the effects of crime and for the development of policies for community crime prevention.