Vigilantism Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Although the term vigilantism is commonly used without much qualification, it is useful to discuss just what the term means. It generally refers to a group activity performed by private individuals that uses violence or the threat of violence to enforce values in absence of effective state intervention. Vigilantism is provoked to deal with deviant acts that may or may not be criminal but is conducted primarily to offer economic or moral satisfaction to members of the vigilante group or the social class that sponsors the activity.

Vigilantism has occurred historically when groups work outside the law in order to achieve what they view as justice, which is almost always class-oriented stability as defined by local elites. In U.S. history and experience vigilantism has occurred when state authority and legal institutions have lagged behind the establishment of courts, law enforcement, and legal authority in the territories or incipient states, the California goldfield vigilantes being the most well-known example. But vigilance committees were also formed in the southern states well after statehood in order to put down real or imagined slave revolts. Self-designated vigilance committees came into being to deal with what reactionary mercantile interests called “political corruption” in the mid-1800s in such disparate places as New Orleans and San Francisco, where elected municipal governments were challenged by what in reality were privately funded militias.

In more recent times groups and even individuals who acted outside of state control have been labeled vigilantes by the press for defending their norms, neighborhoods, municipalities, or themselves from criminals. Today individuals and groups have used computers, cell phones, and social networking sites to shame or harass people who have transgressed social or legal norms. Such individuals, labeled Internet vigilantes, are acting in the same way as earlier settlers on the U.S. frontier, where the state had neither the ability nor the resources to enforce the law or accepted norms. That is, cyberspace represents a new frontier, and states have not acted particularly effectively to police it, nor have modern electronic capabilities been used efficiently as tools in law enforcement.

History of Vigilantism in the United States

The first historical examples of vigilantism in the British North American colonies occurred during the American Revolution. Both Tories (pro-British) and anti-British patriots raised private armies, which attempted to pacify the backcountry in the Carolinas. Groups known as regulators imposed lynch law on deserters, outlaws, and partisan bands that operated in the sparsely settled wilderness. Some groups became military units fighting on either side in more formal engagements. The term regulator became synonymous with “vigilance committee” and was used thereafter by other groups.

In Texas during the 1830s and into the late 19th century vigilante groups took on the label of regulator, or that of moderator, in order to give some precedence to their private law enforcement efforts. Moderators came into being to control the regulators. On a number of occasions the state government had to send in militia to quell the out-of-control partisan warfare between these fundamentally opposed factions. This became particularly acute following the Civil War, when accused cattle thieves were being hung or shot on sight by regulators. Sometimes corrupt sheriffs were shot and jails destroyed by armed vigilante groups. In the chaos that occurred during that conflict and which followed the war, Unionist and pro-Confederate groups waged war on each other. This led to feuding, which continued into the early 1900s. The celebrated gunfight at the O.K. corral might be interpreted as partisan vigilante warfare between Democrats and Republicans battling for hegemony in the post–Civil War frontier West.

Contemporary Examples

In the present day, Internet vigilantes have mobilized against people who try to arrange sexual assignations with children, hence the To Catch a Predator reality-television series, in which men are lured into compromising situations with computer-aided adults masquerading as children, then roughly handled by police in a perp walk of public shaming. This almost precisely duplicates vigilantism of the 1700s, in which public shaming was an essential element of the offender’s treatment, generally leading to tarring and feathering and possible death from complications from that ordeal.

Another example of Internet vigilantism involves a young South Korean woman who was filmed while she allowed her dog to defecate on the subway and did not clean it up. Her photo and that off the offending canine was posted on the Internet. The “Dog Poop Girl” situation stirred widespread indignation, and she was harassed by groups of people who had pinpointed her home using online resources. She eventually dropped out of college as a result of the effects of the public shaming. Similar events have directed public outrage toward animal abusers in the United States and adulterers in China. American businesses that denied women and children access to restrooms have also been targeted by social media and hostile reviewers, leading to changes in company policies.

Justifications for Vigilantism

Philosophers have attempted to set conditions under which taking the law into one’s hands, that is, outside the aegis of state control, is permissible. Those conditions include: when the state is not enforcing good laws, when the state enacts bad or evil laws, and when the state fails to enact good laws.

In the first case it should be noted that under frontier conditions afforded by new technology, territoriality, and incipient statehood, that is, the actual historical American west, the inner city, or cyberspace—all frontiers of a sort, where law and order lag—philosophers have defended vigilantism as filling a vacuum and affording regular folk and economic interests stability and security so that they can function. Since law enforcement is not or was not really operating, the self-policing actions of so-called vigilantes did not interfere with criminal justice functioning. However, as in San Francisco in the 1850s, where mercantile-funded vigilantes justified corruption and crime as an excuse to overthrow a duly elected municipal authority, seized state shipments of arms, and carried out lynchings, vigilantism can scarcely be justified. It was sedition, plain and simple. In New Orleans in the same era, disaffected conservatives similarly tried to overthrow an elected government but were defeated.

When the state enacts bad or evil laws it is not difficult to justify a vigilante-like posture. However, the matter is strongly tinged by relativity. Laws protecting Native Americans were perceived as evil and ignored by settlers in the 1800s, and mobs of vigilantes seized Indians’ property and expelled them from entire counties, especially in Georgia and the Carolinas. President Andrew Jackson even justified these actions beforehand by denigrating a pro-Indian ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, supposedly saying “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; let him enforce them.” After the mobs of vigilantes had acted, federal troops proceeded with Indian removal and the Trail of Tears. This is an example of how vigilantism reflects popular sentiment and may precede formal legal action.

Similarly, laws protecting the rights, property, and persons of newly freed slaves after the Civil War were perceived as evil by some southern whites and pointedly violated by gangs of night-riding vigilantes. Jim Crow laws depriving blacks of their rights and forcing them into a segregated status were to follow. So, the perception of a situation as viewed by specific social audiences is a critical variable in considering if laws are actually “evil”; that is, “evil” according to whom?

Finally, there are situations in which the state fails to enact good laws. A case in point involves the recent introduction of “bath salts” and synthetic cannabinoid drugs. Many of these substances contain toxic mixtures and substances, which are harmful in the extreme, but as yet they are not technically illegal. These drugs are often sold at smoke shops, convenience stores, and various other public venues because they are legal. Groups of concerned parents and young people, sometimes labeled vigilantes, mount protests asking that these businesses stop selling this merchandise. This has led to law enforcement agencies acting precipitously and perhaps illegally in prematurely raiding the businesses and seizing the problematic substances. Lag of law or cultural conflict often explains the failure of the state to enact “good laws.” But again, this is a highly relativistic enterprise. In the present case, for example, many users of these drugs and those who sell them would find the passage of these laws oppressive and bothersome; groups of parents and law enforcement officials might think otherwise.

Ultimately it must be noted that vigilantism usually aids mercantile or conservative local elites in establishing hegemony and stability essential for the pursuance of their economic and moral interests. Thus, vigilantism is always a function of differential power relations. Those in power use vigilantism to oppress problematic oppositional political or economic groups. In the frontier case vigilantism usually precedes the establishment of state control and the foundation of formal agencies of law and courts. In modern settings such manifestations as Internet vigilantism reveal the inability of the state to cope with the frontier that the Internet has made.

Bibliography:

Ayers, E.L. Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Brown, R. B. Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Cutrer, T. W. “Southwestern Violence.” In C. R Wilson and W. Ferris, eds. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Dumsday, T. “On Cheering Charles Bronson: The Ethics of Vigilantism.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, v.47 (2009).
Johnston, L. “What is Vigilantism?’ British Journal of Criminology, v.2 (1966).

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