Hawaiian Gardens Seeks Guardian Angels

City officials in Hawaiian Gardens have invited the Guardian Angels to help them fight a sharp rise in major crimes.

The City Council voted unanimously earlier this week to officially welcome the self-styled anti-crime volunteers to patrol the one-square-mile city of 12,500 mostly low-income residents.

“We can’t afford to pay any more for law enforcement. We thought this would be a good idea,” Mayor Pro Tem Domenic Ruggeri said Thursday.

The city spends an estimated $815,000 of its $2.7-million annual budget on law enforcement.

This is the first time the group has been officially invited into a city, a Guardian Angels spokeswoman said.

“Usually it’s the residents or someone from a community that will ask us to come in to help with a particular crime problem,” said Yolanda Aguirre, leader of the Angels’ Los Angeles chapter.

The officials’ decision has not pleased the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which provides police services to the city.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Sheriff’s Lt. Joe Surgent said. “I’m reluctant to have outsiders come in to patrol the city streets. They have no legal standing.”

Surgent said the department would prefer that only residents, such as members of Neighborhood Watch programs, be involved in helping to keep the streets safe.

“We want citizens to be our eyes and ears, and call us when they see a crime being committed. We don’t want them trying to handle it themselves,” the lieutenant said.

Ruggeri said that, despite the sheriff’s reluctance, he wants the Angels in Hawaiian Gardens. Ruggeri, 67, who was elected to the council in April, said one of his campaign promises was “to make the streets safer.”

In 1988, the state Department of Justice ranked Hawaiian Gardens sixth out of 16 neighboring cities in per-capita crime rate.

“If we don’t like what the Guardian Angels are doing, we can always ask them to leave,” Ruggeri said.

City Atty. Maurice O’Shea said Hawaiian Gardens is not assuming any liability for the group coming into the city.

“They want to come and the city is welcoming them, but they are in fact independent,” O’Shea said.

Aguirre said the “biggest thing holding us up is a need for transportation. It is quite a long way from Hollywood (where the group is operating now) to Hawaiian Gardens.” Hawaiian Gardens is about 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

Major crimes rose 26% last year, according to the Sheriff’s Department. The biggest increase was in auto thefts, which soared 55%.

The Guardian Angels, known by their distinctive red berets and white T-shirts, organized in 1979 in New York as a civilian force to patrol the streets to deter crime. They make citizen’s arrests but do not carry weapons.

The group claims to have about 60 chapters with about 5,000 members across the United States and in Canada and France.