Move to bring Guardian Angels to Riverhead brings backlash from police union, town board and BID

Not so fast.

Riverhead Town Board members and the town police rank and file are voicing objections to the prospect of Guardian Angels patrolling local streets.

The president of the Riverhead Police Benevolent Association makes no bones about it.

“I don’t think we need it,” Det. Dixon Palmer said in an interview this morning. “I think our officers are doing a great job downtown. I think it’s safe downtown and I don’t see where the Guardian Angels are going to make that much of a difference,” he said.

Palmer said he believed the presence of the Guardian Angels would send the wrong message: that downtown isn’t safe.

Board members expressed similar concerns.

“It tells people visiting Riverhead there’s a safety problem,” Councilman James Wooten said. “When you see the Guardian Angels around you perceive there’s a problem with safety.”

Councilman John Dunleavy believes it would reinforce an existing perception problem. “People’s perception is that there are gangs and drugs, that you can’t walk on Main Street. That’s all wrong,” Dunleavy said. “I go down there any time of night and I’m not afraid to walk around and my wife’s not afraid to either.”

Town Supervisor Sean Walter endorsed the idea of the Guardian Angels coming to Riverhead shortly after the organization started talking about patrolling in the Village of Greenport, where Latino gang activity led to a shooting and machete attack in nearby Southold in October. Concerned about a string of attacks on Hispanic men in downtown Riverhead last year, he first met with Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa in December to discuss it.

Sliwa says there is plenty of evidence of MS-13 and 18th Street gang activity in Greenport in the form of mob-style shakedowns of Hispanic business owners, graffiti and violence.

The gangs are directly linked to Riverhead, which he characterized as “the epicenter of the street gang activity that plagues the area.” The county jail — “where there are some 300 gangbangers mixed into the inmate population” — is a major reason why Latino gangs have put down roots in Riverhead, he said, and its central location makes it a natural conduit for travel to points east or west.

The Guardian Angels will recruit local residents for patrols through programs and services run by church-related groups, such as the North Fork Hispanic Apostolate, Sliwa said — just as it’s done in Greenport. The response from the community has been very good, he said.

The Guardian Angels intended to begin patrols in Riverhead in February, but plans were hampered by severe weather and conflicts in Sliwa’s schedule that made it difficult to set up a kickoff meeting in Riverhead until yesterday, Sliwa told RiverheadLOCAL this week.

Walter has been talking about the idea publicly for months — and even spoke about it in his “State of the Town” speech in February. But until now, board members never voiced any objections. Walter blamed Councilwoman Jodi Giglio, who is challenging Walter for the Republican nomination for supervisor.

“If the town board had a negative opinion of it, no one said a single word,” Walter said. “This is politically motivated 100 percent by Jodi.”

Gabrielsen: ‘It worries me’
But all four council members argue that this should have been discussed as a board. They said they didn’t speak out until now because they didn’t realize plans were actually being formulated to start the patrols. During Tuesday’s regular meeting, Walter told a constituent the chief of police was meeting with Sliwa later that afternoon to discuss starting patrols. That’s when board members say they realized it was actually going to happen.

“I wasn’t aware of all these arrangements,” Councilman George Gabrielsen said. “To me this is a civil patrol of sorts. This has got to be a town board initiative.”

He expressed concerns about the town’s potential liability for actions by Guardian Angels.

“You’re putting red caps on them and sending them out. Who are these guys and who’s doing the recruiting? Are they running background checks on people?” Gabrielsen asked. “Are we assuming any liability with this? It worries me.”

Walter said there is “no town action here. There’s no contract. It’s a group of volunteers who can do this whether or not we even want them to. I don’t see a downside to having a volunteer group coming in to help us,” Walter said.

“The bottom line is you don’t do something like this without the town board’s support. This wasn’t vetted correctly,” Gabrielsen said.

Giglio: ‘another unilateral decision’ by supervisor
Giglio called the plan “another unilateral decision” by the supervisor who, she said, has “a history of not including the board on decisions.”

Walter said he had not considered this a board decision because it’s a “police policy issue” and he, as police commissioner (under state law, the town supervisor serves in that capacity) discussed it with Chief David Hegermiller. Board members knew about this from the start, he said. “I brought it up at a work session, so I don’t understand their silence right along if they didn’t like the idea.”

The PBA president said the police chief never discussed the idea with his officers either.

“I think he really should have,” Palmer said. “When you have them downtown with their red hats on, it gives you the idea that it’s not safe – and it is safe downtown. My officers are doing a great job.”

Giglio said she viewed the invitation to the Guardian Angels as “an insult to our police officers.”

“That’s exactly why Councilwoman Jodi Giglio is ill-equipped to be police commissioner, let alone town supervisor,” Walter responded.

“This is all about outreach to the Hispanic community and building relations with that community. The Guardian Angels will be able to provide us with insights and information we’d never have access to otherwise,” the supervisor said. “All good police departments, including the Town of Riverhead’s great police department, thrive on information. The more we have the better we are equipped to respond.

“It’s a testament to Jodi’s lack of understanding that she would even utter words like that.”

‘We’re not like Huntington’
Walter said that despite the best efforts of town police, there is gang activity in Riverhead and he wants to stem its growth.

“You don’t want to be in a situation like you have in South Huntington, where by the time you respond to the problem it’s too late,” Walter said.

Dunleavy, a retired Riverhead cop, said Riverhead doesn’t have a gang problem. “They had a problem in Greenport with that shooting and it was gang related,” he said, referring to last fall’s incident in Southold. Police said the shooting was a result of the escalation of a dispute between MS-13 and 18th Street gang members that began in a Greenport park.

“Then they said everyone has a gang-related problem,” Dunleavy said.

In November, Riverhead Police today announced they brought a felony assault charge against one of the five Southold suspects in connection with an Oct. 10 shooting on Maple Avenue in downtown Riverhead.

“Are they doing killings in Riverhead? No,” Dunleavy said. “The problem we have is we’re connected to Southampton with our address. I can see someone being killed over in Flanders and they say it’s Riverhead,” he said.

But council members insist the perception is worse — much worse — than reality. And, they say, the very visible presence of the Guardian Angels will contribute to the negative perception held by visitors.

“If everybody was getting killed once a month or getting beat up once a month then I’d say we have a problem,” Dunleavy said. “We’re not like Huntington.”

Wooten, also a retired Riverhead cop, said the presence of the Guardian Angels send the wrong message to visitors, even if they make local people feel safer.

“If I were a visitor I would say, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on in this town that they need Guardian Angels here?’” Wooten said.

Riverhead Business Improvement District Management Association president Ray Pickersgill echoed that concern.

”People associate the Guardian Angels with gang problems,” Pickersgill said. “The biggest gang presence is Greenport, not Riverhead. I don’t think we have the gang presence other towns have. If anything, I think it might be the other side of the river,” he said, referring to Riverside. “Do they migrate from there to here? Yeah, I guess they do,” he added. “But I believe the police are doing a fine job in downtown Riverhead.”

BID president: Can we really trust Sliwa?
Pickersgill said he’s got longstanding doubts about Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who, the BIDMA president recalled, has admitted to faking crimes to get good publicity for his group in its early days.

“I’m not crazy about him,” Pickersgill said. “He built his reputation on having a few successes and some of his early successes were faked. So I don’t have a lot of faith in the guy. How do we know he wouldn’t do that again?”

Sliwa said in an email last night what he did in the early days of the group’s existence — which he characterized as “the faking of crimes for publicity” — was a result of his own immaturity. Sliwa admitted to the faked crimes in 1992, many years later.

“Many of us were being arrested falsely, including myself, as part of a wave of intimidation from the [NYC] Transit Police union,” he wrote. “They viewed us as vigilantes, hells angels and gang members. They would refute information about any good deeds that we would perform. It become a heated PR war with Ed Koch and the cops on one side bad mouthing us and nobody publicly supporting us. The…false exploits…gave us some breathing room from the daily criticism and attacks,” he said.

“If I could redo it, I would not have made the same mistake,” Sliwa said.

Pickersgill said he’s not sure he believes him. “If he’s in the same situation again… I don’t know what to say.”

Sliwa’s early years with the Guardian Angels were “a baptism by fire,” he said.

He’s not one to shy from controversy. Some would say he invites it.

As a talk-radio host on WABC, “he’s a lot of bluster and bravado,” the town supervisor said.

“I didn’t even like him until I met him,” Walter said. “He’s a very different person than he seems.”

Giglio: Sliwa’s Facebook post on Polish Town ‘racist’
But his public persona is a cause for concern, according to Giglio. She pointed to Sliwa’ Facebook post after visiting Polish Town Tuesday. He posed for a picture in front of the Polish Town sign on Pulaski Street and Osborn Avenue. Underneath it he wrote:

Patrolling in Polish Town (Riverhead) where there are no Polish people left, only Mexicans. Not one of whom as we patrolled Downtown Riverhead was celebrating Cinqo de Mayo. Most were doing their laundry in the biggest state of the art Laundromat that I’ve ever seen.
Meantime in Ronkonkomo [sic] on my way back to the city, Whites and Blacks were eating guacamole and drinking Tequila in the Bars advertising their Cinquo de Mayo specials. Is there something wrong in having a holiday to honor Mexico when Mexicans themselves don’t aknowledge [sic] it as a holiday?

“I thought it was rather racist,” the councilwoman said. “And the supervisor is saying he’s going to build relationships with the Hispanic community? That doesn’t seem like a good way to start.”