New Haven Independent

“Sweetie Pie” is the Guardian Angel name of Elizabeth Campbell. She was among 12 Edgewood neighbors who graduated Sunday from a training program and started hitting the streets.

Campbell said she joined the Angels because she was fed up with the state of her community. “We wanted to stop the violence, we didn’t like the violence going on,” she said, describing a shoot-out directly in front of her house on Winthrop Avenue. “We need to teach this world how to be peace.”

She and her fellow red beret-sporting Guardian Angels held their graduation ceremony outside the police substation on Whalley Avenue Sunday. They have been training since the summer, learning self-defense and patrolling strategies while traveling as far as Washington, D.C. to work with other Guardian Angels.

A graduate (pictured, at center) who asked to be identified by her Angel nickname “Brick,” cited her “disgust with the crime activity in my own neighborhood, right around my own house” as her motivation for joining the Angels. She described a difficult training process, explaining, “You’re a Guardian Angel first, you’re a woman second.” When asked about the pins on her hat, which are an Angel tradition, she lit up with pride. “There is nothing more proud than knowing you’re part of the solution in your community,” she said.

Eliezer Greer, accompanied by Curtis Sliwa (pictured), leader of the New York-based Angels, led the graduation ceremony. Before presenting diplomas to the graduates, Greer thanked Sliwa and city policemen and officials who have encouraged community policing activities in the city. Sgt. Stephen Shea was presented with an Archangel award for “busting his shoes as a member of the New Haven Police Department,” Sliwa said. He also granted a collective award to the Edgewood Park Defense Patrol, which is led by Greer.

This separate community patrol departs from the unarmed Guardian Angel methodology by supplying its patrollers with guns, but Greer and Sliwa have a high-functioning partnership. “Even though their methods were different than ours, they were cool and collected,” Sliwa said of the EPDP. “They have been the leading, driving force in terms of private safety and return of the quality of life in New Haven.”

Greer first invited Sliwa to New Haven last June to help EPDP gain its footing. Since then, Greer said, the EPDP has helped reduce the area’s crime rate by 55 percent. Greer enthusiastically welcomed New Haven’s freshly anointed Guardian Angels to the trenches of an urban community’s fight against crime.

Sliwa also congratulated graduates and praised the diversity of the group. “What you’ve seen is black and white, Jew and Gentile, man and woman unite in unity against the criminals,” he told a crowd of reporters, New Haven residents, and friends and family of the graduates. What all of the new Guardian Angels share, he said, is that “they dare to care, they want to improve public safety, they believe in a concept of we, not me.”

New Haven’s Guardian Angels will patrol not only Edgewood, but other neighborhoods like the Hill and Fair Haven. Sliwa hopes that these Angels will train new recruits and expand the patrol not only throughout the city but to other parts of Connecticut. Greer announced that the EPDP and the Angels are now teaming to focus on bringing down slum lords and absentee landlords in New Haven, which sparked applause from the audience.

Sliwa repeatedly addressed “nay-sayers,” referring to critics of the community patrols and their complaints that the EPDP and Guardian Angels would only add to community violence.

“To the nay-sayers,” Sliwa declared, “Oofah to you, who are sitting in the suburbs, watching football.” He praised the graduates and Greer and his patrollers for defying negative expectations and making a difference in their community.