Guardian Angels Return to Valley to Fight Crime ‘Hot Spots’ : Volunteers: From their Van Nuys headquarters, 20 members are ready to patrol two nights a week.

Saying they have been inundated by calls from residents frightened by crime, the Guardian Angels on Wednesday returned to the San Fernando Valley, opening a local headquarters and launching patrols on Sepulveda Boulevard.

“People are realizing there is just not going to be a police officer on every corner,” said Guardian Angels Southern California director Weston Conwell. “The budget is just not there and the money is not going to be there.”

Conwell said his private group, which conducts anti-crime patrols by civilian volunteers who have no police powers, has received hundreds of requests for assistance, especially after the Los Angeles Police Department released studies of Valley crime “hot spots.” The studies indicated that stretches of Sepulveda Boulevard were high crime areas blighted by prostitution, robbery and some rapes and assaults, and that other areas were similarly afflicted.

One call was from G.C. (Brodie) Broderson, a 64-year-old Guardian Angels volunteer for 10 years, who offered to help bring the Angels to the Valley.

“We’ve got the whole ball of wax here,” Broderson said Wednesday, as he prepared to go out on patrol from the group’s new Van Nuys headquarters on Sepulveda Boulevard near Victory Boulevard with the first handful of recruits. “You’ve got your rapes, homicides, robberies, break-ins, muggings. It all comes together in a neat little package, right along Sepulveda Boulevard.”

The Angels set up shop in the Valley once before, in 1982, but pulled out three years later to consolidate operations in Hollywood. “We realized that was a mistake,” Conwell said Wednesday.

He said the group already has 20 members ready to patrol Valley streets in their trademark red berets and white T-shirts emblazoned with the Angels logo. He said he hopes to solicit additional local volunteers who know the neighborhoods, who could be sent out on patrol after three months training.

At first, patrols will be limited to two nights a week, with another night set aside for training.

Senior Lead Officer Joe Losorelli of the Los Angeles Police Department, who organized Sepulveda Boulevard merchants into a crime watch group, was skeptical about the Guardian Angels and their intentions.

“I don’t know what they are trying to accomplish. Anything in a problem area that will benefit the community is great,” Losorelli said. “But I don’t know if they will. I don’t know if they are vigilantes or what.”

Broderson, like Conwell, said residents welcome the group. The Angels, he said, are not a bunch of vigilantes as some critics have charged since the New York-based group was founded in 1979, but committed volunteers dedicated to fighting crime.

“I’m elated,” said Broderson, a retired photographer from Mission Hills. “We’ve got a million or more people in the Valley and no volunteer groups except some neighborhood groups that don’t seem to be doing too well. Otherwise, the prostitutes wouldn’t be there anymore.”

Capt. James McMurray of the LAPD’s Van Nuys Division said police would welcome the Guardian Angels as long as they limited their activities to scaring away prostitutes, their customers and drug buyers. Confrontations with drug dealers or other felons, he warned, could be dangerous.