Guardian Angels Set Up Anti-Crime Branch In Puerto Rico
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Puerto Rico is the latest target of the Guardian Angels, the citizen cops in red berets and sateen jackets who took crime-fighting into their own hands in New York City. The Angels, founded by Curtis Sliwa in 1979, announced Tuesday that they’re hitting the streets of San Juan. “Violence associated with drug trafficking is much worse there than in New York,” said Arnaldo Salinas, 42, a Bronx-born Angel who grew up on the Caribbean island and works as a security expert. He and three other veteran Angels are to fly to Puerto Rico on Wednesday to start training some of about 40 local volunteers who have signed up for crime patrols, mostly in San Juan. In the U.S. Caribbean territory of 4 million residents, 774 homicides were reported in 2002, about 80 percent of them drug-related. In New York, with about 8 million residents, crime plummeted to 584 killings in 2002, and the nation’s largest city is now patrolled by federal forces armed with M-16 rifles. The unarmed Angels are only about 75 strong in the city — a dramatic drop from their peak of about 1,000 in the 1980s. But they’ve opened 27 branches in American and foreign cities including Washington, D.C., London, Tokyo and Rio de Janeiro. In Puerto Rico, the Angels will be what Sliwa calls “a visual deterrent” — working alongside armed law enforcement units and serving as eyes and ears tracking community crime. The Angels are “a good resource for our city and our police department,” said Lt. Daniel Mendez Velez, a Puerto Rican police precinct commander who has promised to assign patrol cars with armed officers as backup for the Angels. In addition to Salinas, a business security director, the Angels traveling to San Juan this week are Miguel Vasquez, 32, a carpenter from East Harlem; Dennis Torres, 40, a Puerto Rican-born martial arts expert who lives in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood and works for the city in youth crisis intervention; and Jason Costa, 31, a youth services employee in Green Bay, Wis. The four men have the support of Puerto Rican government officials to prepare the new volunteers, who must be at least 16 years old and undergo police background checks. Trained in self-defense and medical first aid, their goal is to facilitate arrests and galvanize a community for crime intervention. In Puerto Rico, that task often involves tackling drug gangs that operate in neighborhoods where they offer social and financial help to struggling families. “These gangs are taking care of little Juan and little Maria: They’re giving families money, paying hospital bills,” Salinas said. “It’s very difficult to break that allegiance. This is not an overnight fix — it’ll take years.” More : puertorico-herald.org |