Following an attack on a 57-year-old gay man in October that left him in a coma, and an admission by police that they can’t increase patrols in Sacramento’s LGBTQ+ gayborhood, residents in California’s capital city’s Lavender Heights district are reviving a citizen patrol they call the Lavender Angels.

Alvin Prasad was attacked outside the Badlands nightclub as he exited the bar with his daughter on Halloween night. Then, 24-year-old suspect Sean Wesley Payton Jr. made disparaging remarks about Prasad and his “flamboyant” costume and punching him, and making him collapse onto the ground. Doctors say the result was permanent damage to the front and back of Prasad’s brain. He remains in a coma.

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His brutal attack left a gay elder in a coma. Now he’s facing hate crime charges.

At a contentious community meeting with police and local leaders two weeks ago at the area’s LGBT Center, residents voiced their frustration over a lack of police presence in the district.

“I was beaten. I was bit four times. I was shoved into a car twice,” one man recounted.

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“I’m tired of feeling bullied out of our own community,’ said another.

“This is a really important, emotional issue, particularly following the attack on our community member who is close to us here at the center,” the Center’s director David Heitstuman told KCRA News. “And so it’s really important for folks to be able to express how they’re feeling about that, and for us to have a discussion about what ongoing threats there are.”

City council member Phil Pluckebaum was frank about the prospect of increased police patrols in the area.

“I’ll be a little less diplomatic,” he told the packed community room. “The Sacramento PD is about half staffed, and we’re not going to be able to make staffing level commitments to meet any kind of service level” for the district.

So community members are stepping in to fill the void, reviving a citizen patrol that walked the district’s streets over a decade ago: The Lavender Angels.

Lavender Heights resident George Raya, known by many as the “Mayor of Midtown,” explained, “The police need more eyes and ears on the street. Citizen patrols do that.”

Raya recalled how the Lavender Angels first landed in the gayborhood in 2012, after a bartender at a local bar started hearing from customers that they’d been victims of hate crimes.

“Everybody had their cell phone, a flashlight, a vest and a whistle, and we had a special number with the police so we could call and get instant response,” Roya told CBS News Sacramento.

There have been nearly a hundred bias-related incidents in the area reported to police over the last two years, but the calls don’t tell the whole story, Roya said. A lot of crimes go unreported.

“If you are a victim of crime, report it. If police don’t know that there’s a problem in a neighborhood, they’re not going to assign resources.”

The Lavender Angels are there to help observe and report, he said, and hopefully bring back a measure of safety and security to a community that needs it.

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