Metro officials have rejected citizens’ pleas to give free passes to Guardian Angels to patrol the city’s most dangerous buses and trains.

D.C. Councilman Jim Graham, motivated by strong interest in the patrols by constituents, tried to get the transit agency to reverse its decision Wednesday. But he was told liability concerns by Metro officials made their opposition “insurmountable.”

Danielle Sigmon, who lives near Gallaudet University, was one of several residents who asked Metro to use the Guardian Angels, a volunteer crime-patrol organization, after a bus rider pulled a knife on a neighbor. Sigmon said she has been accosted numerous times and rarely rides the bus now.

“I always am afraid when I take the bus,” Sigmon said. “The bus ride is a nightmare and the provisions they have now in place are not working.

This story continues below
Advertisement

Metro’s denial comes as Metro robberies increased by more than 100 percent last year and attacks on bus drivers have doubled from five years earlier.

The Guardian Angels have placed three-member patrols on buses in Anacostia and Northeast D.C. for the past two years, since teenagers attacked and shot one of the Metro buses on Rhode Island Avenue, said John Ayala, D.C. chapter leader and Mid-Atlantic director of the Guardian Angels.

Last month, on the bus between Minnesota Avenue and North Capitol Street, the Guardian Angels made a citizen’s arrest after a man who was smoking marijuana pulled a knife on the members.

But the cost to hop on and off the routes limits the volunteer patrols to about an hour a week, he said.

“We’re not asking for a dime. We’re just trying to help the citizens,” Ayala said. “We are not a fly-by-night group. We’ve been in D.C. for 20 years.”

But Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority officials said the red beret-wearing safety patrol group was not a law enforcement agency.

“We’re not turning them away,” said WMATA spokeswoman Cathy Asato. “They’re welcome into our system. They just have to pay like anybody else.”

Ayala pointed out the group got its start patrolling the subways in New York 30 years ago, and this week the Guardian Angels have been asked to bolster subway security in Philadelphia after a passenger was brutally beaten on one of the trains.

smccabe@dcexaminer.com