Jewish Auxiliary Police Groups at War with Each Other

The NYPD is stepping into a long-running feud between two rival Orthodox Jewish patrol groups in Crown Heights in order to unite them into a single police-supervised unit. Shmira and Shomrim are two bitterly-divided private crime-patrol organizations that split in the late '90s. (Here's one explanation of their complicated rivalry.) In an exclusive titled, "Jew Guys Need to Talk," the Post reports that Shmira has agreed to the merger, but Shomrim refuses to sit down with Shmira, who they accuse of slashing patrol-car tires, making prank emergency calls and falsely informing on Shomrim to the police. Yossi Stern, director of Shmira, denies the allegations: "It's all a bunch of rhetoric. Show me a police report. We're not out to harass anybody. We're out to do a service for the community." You'll recall that members of Shmira were suspected of beating a 20-year-old black man, Andrew Charles, in Crown Heights last April.

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By John Del Signore in News on September 22, 2008 3:00 PM

Comments [rss]

Snoopy

True the Nazis allowed the Jews to have their own police force in the Warsaw Ghetto, but after realizing their mistake they corrected it. Permanently.

maricopafreedom

Shmira has a blog where they actually posted pictures of accused (by them) minors who weren't arrested for any crime. When I commented on the blog that I thought that was wrong, they changed my comment to say that it was "wonderful." Given this small experience, I wouldn't want to work with them either. They don't seem like they really care about their community.

FelixtheCat & Christine Quinn'

they don't own the neighborhood and they should not have their own police force. What a crazy sick vicious group

schadenfreudian mensch

@TJ

I don't see the problem TJ. If the Nazi were willing to let the Jews have their own police force in the Warsaw Ghetto why not New York City. Makes perfect sense to me.

Future Taliban

Wait til more Muslims move into the area and start their own "Taliban" patrols.

Then we'll have recreated the perfect miniature Arab-Israeli conflict and we can charge admission to let viewers watch them blow each others heads off.

Snoopy

Is this another of those "never again" groups? And have the same mentality that all white people enslaved the blacks?

And people keep bitching about the average American arming themselves.

ed_Extinct

Hatzoloh is not just in nyc. it's in a lot of nations. it was started here, but has expanded.

Agnostic Farts

now imagine if the rastas in crown heights wanted to start up their own little neighborhood policing group...

Snoopy

This really calls into question that peace in the middle east is obtainable.

Tgirl

can't we all get along?

Jewssip

Sounds like there's some new crosstown beef going on and it's kosher. Watch out the blood and the crips, jets and the sharks, here comes Shmira and Shomrim!

www.jewssip.com- Celebrity News From a Higher Authority

TJ

Here is a neighborhood police blog:

http://www.crownheights.info/index.php?catid=23&blogid=1

Sounds like the producers of COPS should consider a spin-off to me.

TJ

This is quite amusing. My favorite is their wanna-be NYPD car:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/nyregion/thecity/01patr.html?scp=1&sq=shmira&st=cse

Just like this community needs their own ambulances (Hatzoloh) they apparently need their own police as well.

Wza

Yep ^

SC

I think it's wrong to refer to these groups as "auxiliary" police groups, lest they be confused with the NYPD's actual auxiliary police force -- which is subject to the oversight and training of a real law enforcement agency.

These are nothing more than vigilantes, IMO. "Private crime-control?"