Angels on the move
Rob Price

If you were the mayor of a municipality called Happyville and learned the Guardian Angels were coming to town, what would your reaction be?

Would you feel grateful, thinking a local Guardian Angels chapter could help the local police department fight crime?

Would you welcome the red jackets and berets on your downtown streets, hoping they would dissuade local hooligans from causing trouble?

How exactly do you feel about red berets?

Actually, if you're like me, you'd probably feel worried.

You would worry a Guardian Angels chapter might attract a bunch of potential nut cases, the kind of people who think it would be cool to dress up like Batman and take on the criminal underworld, one Batarang at a time.

You would worry the presence of red-beret-wearing foot patrols on your downtown streets would be a national embarrassment. No mayor likes to advertise the fact their community needs a Guardian Angels chapter to handle its street problems.

Above all, you would worry someone might get hurt. There are dozens of possible scenarios. They boil down to the wrong people being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A conflict spirals out of control. Things turn ugly. And cleaning up the mess takes years.

Those are the sorts of things I, at least, would worry about as mayor. Recent events in the Village of Bath, however, are going a long way toward easing my concerns about the formation of a local Guardian Angel chapter, whose members have been meeting for about a year. Today, I received a press release from the Bath Police Department announcing the arrest of an alleged bicycle thief based on "a tip from the newly formed Guardian Angels."

The press release sits beside a thick pile of documents given to me by Dave Rouse, the Bath police chief, who has been meeting with local Guardian Angels to review a few points about "citizens' arrests."

A citizen's arrest is the sort of action Batman takes when he sees a crime occurring. And according to Rouse, citizens' arrests are the right of any citizen who is witness to a crime. But Rouse adds a constitutional warning - in the form of the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized."

That's a Constitutional restriction any police officer has to be aware of during the course of his or her patrol. And Rouse notes the typical training period for a new police officer is 635 hours, many of which are dedicated to such Constitutional matters.

Batman rarely is confronted with Constitutional issues when he is on patrol. But experienced police officers know there are lots of ambiguous moments on the street, and a police officer ignores the complex legal nature of the street at his or her peril.

The civil courts, Rouse notes, are not friendly to over-eager police. "Our civil rights are something the courts have always had a very liberal sense of," he told me recently. "Those are rights we don't take for granted."

The downside of a wrongful arrest is expensive. The pile of documents Rouse gave me includes a newspaper article describing a $180,000 jury award to a Baltimore woman wrongfully arrested by city police. There is also a decision by the US Court of Appeals, 11th Circuit, upholding a $117,000 award to an individual wrongfully imprisoned by the security department of a Barnes and Noble bookstore.

"You might have the best of intentions, but Good Samaritan laws will not cover you in the event of a wrongful arrest," Rouse said.

Instead of risking a bad arrest, the police chief has been encouraging the fledgling Guardian Angels chapter to report suspicious activity to the police themselves. And based on the press release I received today, it looks like the local chapter is happy to follow that advice.

"If they stay within the parameters of what the law is and the guidelines I've given them, there won't be any problems," Rouse told me.

No problems? That's what I'd like to hear, if I were the mayor.