The restaurant owners' action in hiring the Guardian Angels comes at a time of rising concern by law-enforcement officials that crack has so strained the police and undermined public faith in the criminal justice system that neighborhoods around the nation are increasingly turning to community patrols and vigilantism to regain control of their streets. ''People are smiling again, old people are coming out of their homes without feeling in danger and the tourists can cross Eighth Avenue without fear.'' ''They're not even fully operational yet, but you can feel the difference,'' said Joe Allen, the owner of the restaurant of the same name. They have an estimated 350 members in New York City.Īlready, in the first 24 hours since the Guardian Angels began operations Wednesday out of the former Cafe de France on West 46th Street, they have helped the police arrest two suspected drug dealers and have chased off a dozen people smoking crack or talking with prostitutes, the Angels and business executives said yesterday. Since their founding in 1979 they have aroused strong feelings, some of praise, some of doubt, about their tactics.
The Guardian Angels are a volunteer group of teen-agers, mostly black and Hispanic, who patrol neighborhoods and the subway unarmed. In an agreement with Curtis Sliwa, the head of the Guardian Angels, the owners of the restaurants along 46th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues have provided a closed restaurant to house the 30 young men who will patrol the area and have promised to feed them from their kitchens. A group of proprietors on Restaurant Row in New York City, distressed over a decline in business that they blame on a surge in the crack trade and inadequate police protection, has recruited the Guardian Angels to patrol their neighborhood.
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