Is vigilantism ever justifiable?

Question

Why not? If so when?

Answer 1

I will not lie...I have a 9 yr old daughter and if anyone every physically harmed her or God forbid if she were sexually or physically assaulted...all bets are off. I would want their balls in my hands and show them a slow and painful death. Sorry if this was too graphic but this is really the first thing that comes to mind and for me personally, it would easily be justified. I guess it depends on the person seeking retribution and their reasons for doing so...

Answer 2

Maybe not according to the law, but which of us could condemn someone whose wife was raped and killed, all evidence pointed to the perpetrator, but he was released on a technicality, and that person took the law into their own hands (this is only a scenario). We must admit that sometimes the law can be flawed, bad guys go free. Right or wrong, I can understand the reason for some vigilantes.

Answer 3

A reasonable person can only answer that question after carefully checking into local statistics of crime deterence and criminal capture. If it ain't very good, buy a gun, and learn how to use it... and aim for the middle. The term "vigilantism" is a FEAR blog used by useless liberals thinking our police, with 80% of there work-load directed at administrative violations (seatbelts?), can prevent crime... Har...

Answer 4

In severe circumstances it particularly is. for example going after Osama Bin encumbered is vigilantism on the grounds that all of us understand we did no longer circulate there to arrest him. The justice gadget isn't suited, yet vigilantism must be reserved for severe circumstances.

Answer 5

Justifiable- no.

Understandable- yes.

Answer 6

Never, if it were we would have a lawless society. Without laws and enforcement society as a whole deteriorates.

Answer 7

It always precedes the creation of law enforcement.

Answer 8

Yes. I am sure we have all heard of an eye for an eye.

Answer 9

always we all have a little copper inside us

Answer 10

When institutions fail to meet felt needs, a number of recurring responses on the part of the communities presumably being serviced may be observed. These vary, perhaps in decreasing order of frequency, from passive resignation or withdrawal to reformist and radical politics to efforts to set up wholly new institutions.

In earlier periods of American history when people felt that there was too much crime, that their persons or property were in danger, that cherished traditions and values were being threatened, and that regular law enforcement officials were not coping with the problem, vigilante-type efforts frequently emerged (for example, see the discussion in Brown 1969). The present era is no exception.

Citizen involvement in law enforcement is not new to the American scene. Counting only those groups which have taken the law into their own hands"," a recent account lists no fewer than 326 vigilante movements during the past two centuries of American history (Brown, 1969: 154).

In his discussion of the tradition of vigilantism in America"," Brown distinguishes between two types of such efforts. The first appeared prior to 1856 in areas where settlement preceded effective law enforcement. The concerns of this type of vigilantism were primarily horse thieves, counterfeiters, outlaws, and badmen. The enforcement, that is, of consensually formulated standards of peace and law.

But with the emergence of the San Francisco Vigilance Committee in 1856 of what Brown calls “neo-vigilantism,” a second form of citizen mobilization was born. Unlike the earlier type, neo-vigilantism found its chief victims among Catholics, Jews, immigrants, Negroes, laboring men and labor leaders, political radicals, and proponents of civil liberties (Brown, 1969: 197).

While the first type of vigilantism filled or attempted to fill a discernible void, the second generally emerged where the regular police and legal systems were already functioning, but where alien groups were seen to threaten the established order. Rather than simple enforcement of the law, the second type frequently involved political struggles for power, racism, attempts to terrorize would-be criminals, and even the desire to spare the public the cost of the conventional judicial process.

Recent self-defense groups differ from more classic vigilante groups in that they, for the most part, have not killed or taken the law into their own hands. Instead, their primary functions have been the surveillance and protection of their own communities, often as an ancillary group to the regular police. They thus more closely resemble the early anti-horse-thief societies which amplified law enforcement through pursuit and capture, but did not try to substitute for it by administering summary punishments. Recent groups have performed largely deterrent functions and have not usually held street trials or meted out alley justice. But the fact that they have chosen to involve themselves as private citizens in police work has meant that the issue, if not the substance, of vigilantism has recurred with them.

One of the most important of contemporary self-defense groups, at least in the last twenty years, has probably been the self-defense guard which organized in Monroe, North Carolina, in 1956. The group's purpose was to protect its members against the harassment and incursive violence of the Ku Klux Klan. It attracted sixty members and received a charter from the National Rifle Association.

The next widely publicized self-defense group patrolled the Crown Heights area of Brooklyn between 1964 and 1966. The group called itself the Maccabees, after a Jewish resistance group which fought to curb Syrian domination in the second and first centuries B.C. Led by Rabbi Samuel A. Schrage, the Maccabees of the 1960s numbered 250 volunteer members and used radio car patrols to report crime and deter potential criminals (Brown, 1969: 201 -202).

In 1965, a year after the Maccabees organized, a black self-defense group known as the Deacons gained prominence in Bogalusa and Jonesboro, Louisiana. The Deacons fielded armed patrol cars to protect blacks and white civil rights workers from Klansmen, white rowdies, and the police, unfortunately, these were not always dissimilar groups.

Led by Charles Sims, the Deacons claimed 7,000 members in Louisiana and 60 loosely federated chapters in Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and the Carolinas (Brown, 1969: 203). A useful case study of a group like the Deacons is given by Harold Nelson (1967).

Shortly after the 1965 Watts riot, a group of black militants organized the Community Alert Patrol to observe the way ghetto residents were treated by the Los Angeles Police. The members were under 24, and at least according to one writer, all had police records (Knopf, 1969: 5).

The following year, at about the time that Oakland, California, rejected a proposal for a police review board, Huey P. Newton organized the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, to inform blacks of their legal rights, and to preserve the community from harm (Knopf, 1969: 6).

Terry Knopf reports a study of youth patrols which worked to limit confrontations, arrests, and violence in ghetto areas during real or imminent civil disorders. She identified and collected information on nine youth patrol groups active during the summer of 1967, and reported that at least eleven additional cities had such patrols during 1968 (Knopf, 1969: 4).

Nash (1968) gives a case study of a one week experimental patrol corps covering seven three-block beats near 117th Street in Harlem. In Newark, Anthony Imperiale's North Ward Citizens' Committee has a membership of roughly 1,000 and has become both an important political issue in itself and a relatively operative peacekeeping force (Mangel, 1969). And, in Boston, a chapter of the Jewish Defense League has created a great deal of controversy by patrolling a Jewish enclave in a predominantly black neighborhood in the wake of three synagogue fires.

In the last two or three years, the concept of civilian policing has overflowed the original street patrol model, coming to focus on more limited contexts such as housing projects, rock concerts, and protest demonstrations. For example, Richard Rogin (forthcoming: I) reports that in 1970 more than 8,500 unarmed and unpaid volunteers are on tenant safety patrols in 93 of the 165 New York City Housing Authority's projects. Similar patrols, on a smaller scale, have occurred and are planned in Boston and other cities, many under official or quasi-official auspices.

The extent of citizen concern over law enforcement issues (though exacerbated by self-seeking politicians) has been demonstrated by numerous opinion polls as well as election results. As part of a broader inquiry into various forms of citizen involvement in the law enforcement process, data have been gathered on 28 currently operating groups that, depending on the group in question and, even more, on one's own perspective, would be labeled self-defense"," vigilante"," security patrols"," or community patrols.

The emergence of self-defense groups raises important questions for public policy as well as social theory. They offer a worthwhile research focus for a number of reasons.

These groups may be seen as a special form of the increasing demand for citizen participation in the planning, control, and delivery of the services which affect them, though perhaps one fraught with a greater potential for conflict and potential disadvantages than other areas where community control is being sought As attempts to breakthrough and go beyond the exclusive and professionalized provinces of established authority, self-defense groups are analogous to community mobilization around issues of schools, urban renewal, transportation, recreation and welfare. They may also be seen as a return to an earlier and less differentiated period in American history when peace and order were not left to the “proper authorities" and outside experts, but were instead the responsibility of the unprofessional citizen.

In addition, self-defense groups clearly have an importance beyond themselves. Citizen mobilization around the issues of lawlessness and crime may be symbolic of broader tensions during periods of rapid transition. For example, the issue of order has face value but can also be a fairly respectable euphemism for preventing are distribution of power between competing groups in society.

With police often either unwilling or lacking the resources to provide adequate protection for tense areas; with rigid requirements which may preclude many potentially effective men from joining the force (such as previous arrest records; past history of radical activities; minimum height, weight and age requirements; or the need to be a policeman full-time); with the exceptional degree of autonomy and problems of accountability which characterize some police departments and the exclusion of blacks, such as in some Southern communities, from almost any participation in, or protection by (and from) law enforcement agencies; with the distance (ideological, social, economic, racial, ethnic, religious, geographical, attitudinal, and even age) which often separate police from many of those they ostensibly serve or at least deal with and often the resulting lack of knowledge about or sympathy for them, and related traditions of hostility and mistrust on all sides; and with instances of mere police presence (even on those occasions when no abuses occur (Marx, 1970) sometimes triggering and enlarging disorders, certain types of citizen involvement in the law enforcement process may be highly desirable.

Yet benign effects and planned policy changes aside, the failure of American society to deal meaningfully with its lack of equality of opportunity (not to mention equality of outcome) and the increased civil disorder and crime which partly stem from this, as well as the related various citizen concerns over law and order, show few signs of decreasing and many of increasing. Increased citizen efforts to deal with law enforcement issues seem very likely. Studying currently existing groups may tell us something about how various communities would respond to the possibility of much more widespread police repression or withdrawal, crime, bombing, armed insurgency, guerrilla-style sabotage, the systematic kidnapping of hostages, and the like