Where are the Guardian Angels?
After nun says ‘nobody knows they exist,’ Curtis Sliwa explains

“Where are the Guardian Angels?”

That question was posed by Sister Margaret Smyth of the North Fork Spanish Apostolate, a Riverhead-based immigrant advocacy group, during last week’s Riverhead Town Board work session.

“Apparently nobody knows they exist, if you want to tell the truth,” Smyth said. “I’ve rarely seen them.”

Smyth said she’s informally surveyed members of the Riverhead Latino community and there is no awareness of the Guardian Angels.

“Nobody knows they exist in Greenport, either,” she said.

She said the leader of the Riverhead and Greenport effort, Ben Garcia, who goes by the name “EQ” called her when Supervisor Sean Walter first invited the group to patrol Riverhead streets, largely in an effort to build bridges with the Latino community here.

“We talked about a meeting, but they’ve never approached me at all. I offered the opportunity to speak to the Hispanic community we have in church, which is a huge number. An average Sunday nightMass for us can be anywhere from 600 to 1,000 people,” Smyth said. “But I’ve never been approached by them to say could we talk to the community.”

“I did not know that,” Walter interjected.

“No, it has not happened. The impact is not really there if you want to tell the truth,” Smyth said. “Either we’re not utilizing them correctly or it’s not necessary to utilize them.”

Asked for comment, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa said in an email Tuesday he had spoken with Smyth after her comments to the town board last week.

“We’re back on track with her,” he said.

“My plan was to approach Sister Margret in September once we had put our structure into place in Riverhead,” Sliwa wrote. “I should have kept her in the loop as a supporter. My mistake.”

Sliwa said the group has four “recruits” patrolling Riverhead, where they started patrolling in June — at first on Wednesdays, then moving the patrol to Saturdays, “when there is more activity.” The group patrols once a week here, he said, and has focused on the area along the railroad tracks, “where some of the previous attacks have occurred.”

After a series of violent muggings of Latino men, Walter reached out to Sliwa last year to discuss bringing a Guardian Angels patrol to Riverhead. The supervisor saw the patrol as a means outreach to the Latino community, intended to make residents feel safer. He said he worried the community would turn to gangs for protection.

But the idea drew opposition from town board members, the Riverhead police union, downtown business owners and the Riverhead BID Management Association, all of whom expressed concern that the presence of the highly visible and well-known red-berets downtown would lead visitors to believe the area was unsafe.

The “unexpected surge of opposition” derailed the groups plans somewhat, Sliwa said. “We were doing outreach to our critics,” he said.

But the weekly patrols have continued, even if under the radar of most people, including, according to Smyth, the community the supervisor was hoping to build bridges with. Sliwa said the group checks in with the supervisor and police department before each weekly patrol, which he says has helped residents and police.

“We have reported graffiti at different locations and they have followed up and removed it. We have removed unruly patrons from some of the Latino-run stores around the LIRR station.

He sent RiverheadLOCAL two photos of two Guardian Angels on patrol in Grangebel Park, where he said members “were helping people with a whole host of issues.”

The Guardian Angels will be speaking to congregants at the Spanish Mass at St. John the Evangelist on Sept. 13, Sliwa said.

Smyth said she favors anything that will help empower people and help them feel and be safer, but she remains skeptical that the Guardian Angels patrol is really necessary.

She believes the Hispanic community’s purported fear of the police is “overemphasized,” at least in Riverhead.

“My experience with the Riverhead has been very helpful. When people come to my office and we say you have to go over there to give a report, they go very willingly and have been received very willingly,” Smyth told the town board last week.

But the Riverhead Police Department’s handling of undocumented immigrants is exactly what some town board members would like to see changed.

Irked by the appearance of Riverhead on a list of “sanctuary cities” circulated online, council members Jodi Giglio, George Gabrielsen and John Dunleavy say the Riverhead Police Department should change its policies. They advocate detaining undocumented immigrants at the request of federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement regardless of whether there is a court-ordered warrant, even where the individual is not being charged with a crime.

Smyth, along with representatives from the Riverhead Anti-Bias Task Force, the N.Y. Civil Liberties Union, the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission and the advocacy group L.I. Wins, met with the town board Aug. 20 to discuss the board members’ recent comments on changing police policies.

The advocates told board members the policy changes they have advocated violate federal law.

“A lack of lawful immigration status is a civil, not criminal, violation,” NYCLU’s Long Island director Amol Sinha told the board. “This has recently been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court.”

He added that “all people in the United States, regardless of immigration status, are entitled to constitutional rights,” which include the right to privacy and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

There was little feedback from the town board at last week’s meeting to what L.I. Wins’ executive director Maryann Sinclair Slutsky called “an educational moment.” But afterward, at least one board member was unmoved.

Giglio, who is seeking election as town supervisor and, if elected, would thus become Riverhead police commissioner, said she had not changed her opinion. In fact, in an interview with News 12 after the meeting, Giglio took it a step further. People who cannot produce proof of legal residency when stopped by police should be taken to police headquarters and fingerprinted, she told the television station.