A beat patrolman had considerable presence once. His discretion was wide. He knew everyone for square blocks around. But in New York tonight he isn’t even allowed to make a crack arrest. Scott McKeown, the Guardian Angels’ West Coast director, told us, “It began with the Knapp Commission. Then there was the 77th Precinct scandal. Now, if an officer suspect there is a drug transaction taking place, either a sergeant has to come down, or they have to bring a narcotics unit in. Meanwhile the deal, which lasted all of maybe three seconds, is gone. We were holding a guy for crack possession last night. Cops came by in an unmarked car. One said, ‘I can’t arrest him. I’m with the crime unit.’ ” That makes a whole lot of sense. The wrong people, it would seem, are just saying no.
Into this absurd legal airpit step the Guardian Angels, each with his blood-clot-red beret on. The standard Angel profile, according to McKeown, would read: “ ‘age 17, black or Puerto Rican, comes from a bad area of town, minimal education.’ If it wasn’t for the Guardian Angels, frankly, he would be sucked up by that negative, deadly subculture of drugs and crime.” There are maybe 250, maybe three hundred, in New York. What they practice, weaponless and by squads of four or six, is an honorable American custom: citizen’s arrest. When they see some crime being committed (and they must see that first), the Angel patrol will hold a perp, by black-belt force if necessary, until police arrive. (I quote New York criminal-procedure law—“in order to effect such an arrest, such a person may use such physical force as is justifiable.”) And where arrest would be futile—with crack users, say, whom police have been told to ignore —they smash drug paraphernalia in public.
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