We have shomrim in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles – Crime is on the rise. Sinister forces abound. Our local police force helps us feel safe and protected. But sometimes, they cannot do it alone. Recent budget cuts in the Los Angeles police department have raised concerns within the community. As these budget cuts are set in place, a new community picture emerges, one in which security forces are less accessible to those who need them the most.
Enter LA Shmira, a new kind of citizen’s patrol. Formed by Kalman Tzvi Lowenstein, LA Shmira provides for the needs of the Pico-Robertson community by protecting the security of the residents, and teaching safety and security. With a critical focus on high-crime areas, LA Shmira stands out for being unequivocally non-vigilante; trained and organized to work directly alongside and in full cooperation with the police department. They have a zero tolerance policy for politics, with a laser focus on their higher mission of meeting the community’s needs, no distractions allowed. LA Shmira members have all emergency contact numbers, such as fire and police departments and Hatzolah, on speed dial, for immediate contact in times of emergency. All members are C.E.R.T. certified and have undergone comprehensive training to prepare themselves to handle a state of emergency within the community.
The Los Angeles Shmira Patrol aims to build bridges of respect and cooperation amongst the diverse religious and ethnic groups in the community. Regardless of race or religion, LA Shmira is on hand to help and promote a higher standard of safe living. Members of LA Shmira speak a variety of languages, and can communicate with and assist all who need help, no matter what their language.
According to Wikipedia: “The Los Angeles Shmira Safety Patrol was originally founded in 2009 by Kenneth Lowenstein in the Pico/Robertson area of Los Angeles. After a slow start a former member of the Guardian Angels named Adam Kratt joined and helped revitalize the patrol. LA Shmira works closely with the Los Angeles Police Department’s Olympic Division and coordinates with the South Robertson District Council’s Safety Committee. LA Shmira currently has 20 members, including three rabbis and a Shmira Juniors program that includes 10 youths.”
The Daily Beast: NYPD Inspector Michael Ameri shot himself Friday in a Department car hours after the FBI reportedly questioned him for a second time about a series of alleged payoffs made by members of New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community—including several big donors to Mayor Bill de Blasio—to high-ranking officials in the NYPD.
That probe has focused on lurid reports of diamonds for top cops’ wives and hookers for those cops on free flights to Vegas, but it’s also put a spotlight on a longstanding nexus of shady dealings between New York City politicians, including the mayor, the NYPD, and the Jewish community’s own “volunteer” police.
A few months before killing himself, Ameri cut ties with one such pretend police officer, Alex “Shaya” Lichtenstein, the New York Post reported. Last month, Lichtenstein was arrested and charged with offering thousands of dollars in cash bribes to cops in the department’s gun licensing bureau in exchange for very tough to obtain in New York City gun permits.
Lichtenstein reportedly bragged that he had procured them for 150 friends and associates, charging $18,000 a pop and paying a third of that to his police connections. According to prosecutors, the scheme had enabled a man with a prior criminal history that included four domestic violence complaints and “a threat against someone’s life” to obtain a gun.
In the criminal complaint, filed in Manhattan federal court, Lichtenstein was identified as a member of Borough Park’s private, all male, unarmed volunteer security patrol, known as the Shomrim (Hebrew for “guards” or “watchers”).
The complaint did not identify any of Lichtenstein’s alleged customers, however, but sources knowledgeable about the Shomrim are skeptical that he was obtaining permits on behalf of, or for, the Shomrim as an organization. Instead, they argue, it is more plausible that Lichtenstein was operating as a freelancer—albeit one who likely exploited police connections nurtured during his time as a member of the group.
After all, it is not exactly a secret that the Shomrim—along with others from the ultra-Orthodox community who serve as unpaid liaisons to various city and state law enforcement agencies–maintain close relations with members of the NYPD, and particularly those who serve in their local precincts.
For example, news sites and Twitter accounts that play to an ultra-Orthodox audience are littered with pictures of Shomrim hobnobbing with high-ranking police officers at pre-holiday “briefings,” honoring them with “appreciation” awards at community breakfasts or charity dinners, and even engaging in friendly competition at an annual summer softball game.
But Lichtenstein aside, it would be a mistake to conclude that for the Shomrim at least these relationships are motivated by the prospect of personal financial gain or status concerns, even though there’s no doubt that having an “in” with the cops can boost one’s standing in the community. Instead, access and influence are the means of achieving a more important communal goal: the freedom to operate as the de facto police force of their communities, but with backup from the cops in the most dangerous situations.
In some sense, it is almost as if the Shomrim view the NYPD as their auxiliary police.
The first of these Brooklyn patrol groups were formed in the 1970s in the Hasidic neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Williamsburg in response to rising neighborhood crime and the belief that the police were not up the task of keeping Jews safe. (The journalist and author Matthew Shaer traces the roots of the Crown Heights patrol to a Hasidic rabbi and teacher named Samuel Schrage, who in 1964 founded a group called the Crown Heights Maccabees following the alleged assault of Hasidic students by a group of black youth and the attempted rape of a rabbi’s wife by a black man.)
Today, Shomrim (and in some cases, rival groups known as Shmira) exist in every ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn (and in other ultra-Orthodox communities in the U.S. and abroad). The groups operate independently and, while their leaders are fond of characterizing them as the “eyes and ears” of their communities, responding to hotline calls about everything from vandalism, missing persons and attempted robbery to domestic violence and even sexual abuse, they do much more than watch and listen. In Brooklyn, they are equipped with SUVs and cruisers tricked out with “police package” flashing lights, sophisticated two-way radio dispatch systems, bulletproof vests and outfits emblazoned with shields that look an awful lot like NYPD ones—all paid for by donations and, in some cases, government largesse funneled to them by members of the City Council.
While they lack the authority to make arrests, even with those similar shields, the Shomrim often do things like search, chase, apprehend, and detain.
Indeed, as the head of the Borough Park Shomrim explained to the Village Voice’s Nick Pinto in 2011, people in the community call Shomrim because “they want to see action right away, not get caught up in a lot of questions and answers…Not that that isn’t the right way for the police to do it—who am I to say they shouldn’t ask a lot of questions?”
But people also call Shomrim—as opposed to 911—because, after all, cops are outsiders. And outsiders cannot always be counted on to be sensitive to the specific concerns of the religious community, concerns that include the desire/obligation to protect other Jews from the long arm of the law. And so, while the Shomrim are not averse—and sometimes quite eager—to help cops nab a suspect who is not one of their own, they can be much less forthcoming when a fellow Jew is the suspect.
