When news broke last week that Sean Patrick Conroy, a 36-year-old Starbucks manager from South Philly, was savagely beaten to death on the 13th Street El platform, it stopped us cold. And with good reason: Conroy’s death was a brutal reminder that when you live in a big city, pretty much anything can happen at any time. It also sent the point home that the Philly street urchin population is sooner or later going to have to be addressed by the City, and for that to be successful, it’s going to have to happen on a variety of fronts. When kids in the city have such a wide-ranging disaffection for human life, it is a systemic problem that good ol’ law and order can only address so much. So today, we’d like to issue a hearty “Thanks, BUT NO THANKS,” to Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels, who’ve single-handedly injected themselves into, and subsequently dumbed down, the situation beyond belief in the last few days. For one, Sliwa is a media whore on the level of Donald Trump, and is an old pro at throwing his vigilante-lite logic into situations like this. For another, as much as they’d like you to believe otherwise, the Angels are a heavily politicized group, pretty much running on the Joey Vento platform of Crazy Motherfuckers Who For Whatever Reasons Could Not Get Jobs As Police So They Do This. Add on to the growing pile of arguments against having a self-appointed pseudo-police force in the subways this fact: There already is one. And while it’s true that they didn’t prevent the death of Sean Conroy, we’re not sure what injecting the Guardian Angels into all this proves. Other than the fact that, yes, that’s one more fucked up thing that can happen: To have your City’s very real problems trivialized, politicized and exploited by some guy with a hero complex. Hey, at least they’re paying their own subway fare, right?
KYW: Oh, Uhm, Ah, Thanks For Coming

This entry was posted on Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 2:38 pm.