San Francisco Guardian Angels: Richmond Recruitment 5/8/10

Saturday May 8th 2010, we the San Francisco Guardian Angels will be doing a tour for recruiting and patrolling in Richmond. The city of Richmond is in development for a Guardian Angel Chapter, but it does have a true leader. The chapter leader for Richmond is Shadow and he will be the one in charge of this tour. For the San Francisco Guardian Angels it is an honor to help out a brother chapter when we can and it has been in our plans to do so. Now it is time to step up to the plate and get Richmond on the list of Chapters in the United States.

All the SFGA start arriving at the HQ around 8:00am for this tour. All the angels have changed into their uniforms and all the angels are ready for prebrief. Prebrief helps put the plan together for this tour and gives all the angels an idea of what we need to do in the city of Richmond. Now we are ready, ready to travel over to Richmond.

We get on BART, we get to our stop (El Cerrito Del Norte Station), we meet up with Shadow at the Walgreen's store, and next he puts two teams together for this tour. Shadow will lead team one and Greencard will lead team two. Next we hit the streets to talk to the people of this community and to get new members for this chapter.

We then march to the TARGET shopping center. As we were there, we did talk to a few people. They were glad to see us out here, but not interested. The day is still early and there is a lot of area to cover. Next, we get to a park and this park is one of the places that Shadow wants to do recruiting, so we march all around the park and we talked to everyone that we could talk to. This was a good spot to do this. We meet all kinds of people that are very interested, we meet recreation counselors, we meet community leaders and we got phone numbers for possible recruits.

But we are not done yet. We still have some patrolling to do, so we start marching, marching down the main street of Richmond. We did get recognized by some media and he stops the patrol to ask if he could get some footage of the angels, which he did and also had an interview with Shadow. As we were done with that, the police stops the patrol and asked us what we were doing out on the streets and we explained that we were out recruiting for new members and looking for supporters for a new chapter that we were starting in this city. They thought that we were having some kind of protest, or having some kind of parade. It did get resolved and they left and we began our march through the area, street by street , corner by corner. This was all we could do. There was nothing happening at this time, so Shadow decides to call it a day and marches the teams back to the BART.

On our way back we detoured through a bike trail/walking trail that this community uses. As we march through this trail we see all kind of graffiti and this graffiti is from all kinds of gangs, gangs like MS13, Crips, Bloods, Surenos, and Nortenos.

But we keep marching to get to the BART. As we get closer to the BART, we come up on some men drinking alcohol, so we had to take there alcohol from them and pour it out and advised them that there is NO drinking in public. We then got back to Walgreen's store across the street from BART to do our debrief. This was a little different being outside, but Shadow does not have a HQ yet, but eventually he will with the support of this city. We did get about 15 to 20 phone numbers, for Shadow to call back, set up meetings, to get them involved in there city, and to get a Guardian Angel Chapter started in Richmond.