Guardian Pegasi?

I caught a long segment with Curtis Sliwa on KRLD this morning. Sliwa is trying to bring his Guardian Angels to crime-ridden Big D and is in town to warm the shoulders of Madame Mayor and Chief Kunkle. When he wasn't hawking Nextel/Motorola walkie-talkies (lord, I hope he's got a sponsorship from them), he was answering calls from the locals, both supportive and not.

I'm not sure yet where I stand on the Angels' descent, but it struck me that when the group is working optimally, their contribution is deterrence, not confrontation. Bad dudes who think someone is patrolling and watching for them (I mean, someone besides, say, a cop) are less likely to commit a violent crime.

Now maybe I read too many comic books as a kid, but I remember the square-jawed goons were always looking over their shoulder to see if some nosy cub reporter was around the corner. 'Cos in an old-timey narrowly-drawn geographic beat system that newspapers used to employ, there was a fair chance they might be.

And maybe it's a day's worth of paint fumes talking. (The living room is well stippled, thank you.) But it seems to me that if a hypothetical news organization had a crew of 50-70 professional reporters, stringers and Citizen Journalists roaming the city, armed with cell phones and cameras; investigating every neighborhood crime they could scoop and actively patrolling for neighborhood news -- our little burg might not be in such dire need of saving. Because that, in and of itself, might be almost as much of a deterrent as a vigilant(e) group of volunteers.

Sure, we might be wearing fedoras with press tags instead of Sliwa's red berets, but we wouldn't be making the kind of confrontational citizens' arrests that make the Angels so controversial and potentially dangerous. Instead we'd be informing the citizenry. And it would be informing us. And each other.

And if you ever see any of our folks duck into a phone boot--

Oh, never mind. We don't have those anymore.