New York City’s Guardian Angels will resume patrolling the city’s subway system after a Guatemalan illegal immigrant allegedly burned a homeless straphanger alive, killing her, on a Brooklyn subway car Dec. 22.
Curtis Sliwa, head of the all-volunteer organization, spoke at the Stillwell Avenue-Coney Island station in Brooklyn where the woman was killed and where the group’s patrol would start, the Post reported.
Three-person patrols would now resume walking through the subway cars, “which is something the police no longer do,” Sliwa said. He reportedly said “hundreds of citizens” had requested the organization’s return as “the subways are out of control.” (RELATED: Guardian Angels Perform Citizen’s Arrest Live On Air As Curtis Sliwa Blasts Eric Adams For ‘Destroying’ NYC)
Guardian Angels will re-appear on subways again in response to sky-high crime pic.twitter.com/53lynsOvc6
— New York Post (@nypost) December 29, 2024
The currently 150-strong group last patrolled subway trains during anti-Asian hate attacks in 2020.
Guatemalan illegal immigrant Sebastian Zapeta-Calil, 33, faces first- and second-degree murder charges for allegedly burning the still-unidentified woman to death and could be jailed for life without parole if found guilty. Sliwa rued the lack of potentially life-saving intervention for the victim.
In a separate video Sliwa shared, he said the New York City Police Department (NYPD) officers started patrolling the subway cars back in 1979 but now are limited to the platforms and turnstiles amid personnel shortage, resulting in a security void. He added that dehydration often made homeless persons prone to hallucination.
“We are the people’s patrol,” he said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBuKxiq-r2I
“We’re going to have to increase our numbers, increase the training and increase our presence as we did back in 1979,” Sliwa said.
Sliwa also slammed the city’s criminal justice system.
“Notice there are no mental health workers, you know, crisis interven[tion] — they have all these fancy names — I’ve never seen them,” he said. “And we spent millions of dollars, I might add.”
The Guardian Angels will conduct welfare checks and “can have a calming effect” on emotionally disturbed persons — as some of such persons know the group, Sliwa said. The group would also work with conductors to alert the police.
Citizens would not intervene in such instances “because, unfortunately, the Daniel Penny effect has frozen them,” Sliwa added. “I’ve seen grown men who normally might have gotten involved — they’re just not getting involved anymore.”
“And we’re here to say, ‘You see something, you say something.’ You gotta do something,” he said.
Democratic former New York Mayor Bill de Blasio inaugurated a task force in 2014 to see that “where appropriate,” suspects with mental health issues do not go on to face criminal justice, or are treated outside jails if they do get charged with crimes, or can receive therapeutic rather than punitive treatment if they are jailed, among other proposed steps, a 2014 action plan report revealed. De Blasio’s council committed $130 million over four years to the project.
The City Council under Democratic Mayor Eric Adams called for $8.9 million to be added to the amount budgeted for mental health courts in the city’s 2025 fiscal year budget to prevent the city’s jails from becoming mental asylums amid the city’s struggle with recidivism.
Adams and NYPD Transit Chief Michael Kemper expressed frustration early March with recidivist crimes in the city’s subway system and the apparent failures of prosecutors and judges who themselves reportedly were hamstrung by state legislation. New York State’s 2019 bail reform also remains a fraught subject.
The Guardian Angels have had a rocky relationship with the police and repeatedly suffered attacks from criminals. Sliwa’s son and fellow Guardian Angel, Anthony, was injured while fending off an attack in early October on him and his stepfather, Democratic former New York State Governor David Paterson.
This article was originally published at dailycaller.com
