Speak about vigilantes and images of Batman and Daredevil are likely to come to mind. Reality has its share of do-good wannabes too, from the notorious Anonymous Collective to the likes of local militias within unstable regions. The community activist in me wants to believe that vigilantes are good for us, that people should ultimately have the power to do regulate themselves, but I know that the situation is a lot more nuanced than that. In this session, we tackled the questions of what exactly constitutes vigilantism and what contexts, if any, permit vigilante justice.

As always, we had a good number of resources to draw from. Here are the most instrumental ones:

1. Derry Journal: ‘Only way to eradicate drugs scourge is to remove the dealers’
2. Economic and Political Weekly: Crime of Vigilante Justice
3. Law and Society Review: Distrust of Government, the Vigilante Tradition, and Support for Capital Punishment
4. WJTV: After Katrina: Camp Shelby, stolen ice, and Sheriff Billy McGee
5. NYT: Reclaiming the Forests and the Right to Feel Safe
6. British Journal of Criminology: What is Vigilantism

What constitutes vigilantism?

Resource #6 defines vigilantism as having the following key features:

1. It involves planning and premeditation by those engaging in it
2. Its participants are private citizens whose engagement is voluntary
3. It is a form of ‘autonomous citizenship’ and, as such, constitutes a social movement
4. It uses or threatens the use of force
5. It arises when an established order is under threat from the transgression, the potential transgression, or the imputed transgression of institutionalized norms
6. It aims to control crime or other social infractions by offering assurances (or ‘guarantees’) of security both to participants and to others.

These delineations are important to ensure we don’t conflate something more docile such as a journalism or something nobler such as traditional civil activism with vigilantism. Vigilantism depends on unstable environments to draw legitimacy, especially on the use of violence. Hobbes’ Leviathan is a great read for anyone who wants to understand the why and how modern states demand a monopoly on violence. The short answer is to ensure that peace and security are safeguarded in a world where man is inherently violent. Vigilantism denies that providence and insists that the common man must be able to take matters into their own hands.

The term violence can also be broadly applied, from direct violence in the use of arms and ammunition to the cyber-violence in the form of hacking and DDOS attacks. Violence must cause harm for it to be defined as such.

Does a vigilante have to be inherently good? Not necessarily. They must only believe that they are enacting justice for some social infraction, a condition that is ambiguous and can be open to bias and interpretation. For example, a white extremist can believe that they are part of a vigilante movement if they believe that laws promoting legal equality are wrong. This ambiguity is a crucial part of the vigilante definition because it is here that the ethical implications of vigilantism are best encountered.

What contexts permit vigilante justice?

It is easy to support vigilantes when it seems that the political machine is ineffective and/or corrupt. Anonymous shuts down dirty politicians and big corporations that it believes are protected by the system. Local militias work outside of the law to find drug cartels or human traffickers because it knows the police have to restrictively work within the law. The utilitarian ideal of believing the means justify the end is a safety blanket for those who support vigilantes.

However, there are important questions that are hidden from this simple calculus. Can we really have our cake and eat it too? I can concede that vigilantes, even with good intent, can solve the problem in the short term but there are important implications. Firstly, there is a transfer of power from legitimate institutions (regardless of who occupy them) to illegitimate institutions, one that is hard to reverse the direction of and demands that the vigilantes either increase their jurisdiction or take over as the legitimate powers (quo revolutionaries). I’m not sure if this is completely viable, especially if vigilantes are driven not by societal good but by the desire to solve only one of many problems. Furthermore, the power transfer may not be to the vigilante in question at all, but an unknown void of vigilantes-in-general. It basically can lead to all-out chaos as various militias take up arms and advance their cause without proper police oversight. History has taught us that situations like these can happen and that the solution often takes the form of a charismatic and moderate politician to bridge gaps and build faith in institutions.

The second question is one of accountability. Democratic institutions are necessary because they are held to scrutiny through the political voting process. Vigilantes seize power and jurisdiction and may solve the short-term issue but are not held to the same standard of scrutiny as politicians. Even our hypothetical Batman fails the standard of understanding the wider needs of society – can one man (or group) truly be able to decide who is right or wrong?

As a private citizen, what is the best situation, assuming institutions fail and politicians are corrupt? It would be for people to solve the problem either internally within the system (political process or being a vocal civil servant) or through revolution, maintaining the institutions as they are and just removing people who are abusing it. Vigilantes as a whole should be avoided even with the temptation of short-term appeasement, with life-threatening exceptions (i.e. Resource #4).

What do you think? Is there a place for vigilantes in our society? Is it even a relevant question? I’d love to hear your thoughts.