Vigilante

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It's the Law

To punish and protect

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“”Tell me, what is a vigilante man? Has he got a gun and a club in his hand? Is that is a vigilante man?

—Woody Guthrie, "Vigilante Man"

Vigilantes are persons or groups who take it upon themselves to enforce the law (or their interpretation of it) without proper legal authority, and to summarily punish wrongdoers. In western society, it is almost universally discredited by official law enforcement, because of the lack of due process, citizen rights, or formal processing necessary in any society with an organized legal system.

Origins

"Vigilante" is a Spanish word meaning "guard". The term was popularized in the American frontier towns of the mid-19^th century, especially during the gold rush periods, when settlements sprang up more rapidly than legitimate law enforcement could be provided to them, and citizens instead elected "vigilance committees" to settle disputes and punish lawbreakers. Contrary to popular belief, many of these early vigilance committees were fairly effective in providing a rugged version of due process, law, and order where the federal government was temporarily unable to.

KKK

See the main article on this topic: Ku Klux Klan

While the earliest frontier vigilance committees were elected from respectable citizens, later ones tended to be secret societies who took the initiative by force, their members often wearing masks or hoods for anonymity. In the Reconstruction-era southern states, a new kind of vigilantism emerged, with Confederate loyalist guerrilla groups such as the Ku Klux Klan enforcing their racially and politically-motivated interpretation of justice by intimidating or lynching liberated slaves or Yankee interlopers. Or just shoot them; sometimes they weren't too picky.

Modern vigilantism

Modern vigilante movements are generally the result of people feeling as if the official system is corrupt or letting them down. Gangs, for example, generally enact a form of justice from within their own groups. Lynch mobs, successful or otherwise, often feel as if a criminal "got off too easily", or feel someone who the law does not or cannot arrest is clearly guilty of the crime and should be arrested.

Minutemen

See the main article on this topic: Minutemen

The minuteman movement acting as "border patrol agents" was started in an atmosphere of paranoia or moral panic spurred by politicians around the undocumented immigration issue in states that border Mexico. The assumption was that the government was not doing enough, so the citizens would "take it into their own hands". Many problems, often involving violence, have arisen from this desire to do it themselves. While the movement began in 2005, by now, it has largely fallen apart due to internal problems ("Where are we going to get the money to fund this?") and the leaders being dead or facing criminal charges (Who knew that murdering people was a crime?).

Internet vigilantism

The popularity of the Internet in recent decades has unfortunately led to the rise of cybercrime, though while law enforcement has stepped up to respond to such incidents, others have stepped in to dish out their own brand of justice, such as those who publicly shamed a band of bullies whose acts have led to the suicide of a teenager, as well as scam baiters targeting financial and tech support scams originating from African countries and in India. Though in the case of online scam baiter Jim Browning, while some outlets do label Browning as a vigilante, he considers himself more as an online investigator educating people — especially elderly and non-tech literate people who are more likely to fall victim to such scams. Browning has also worked alongside law enforcement agents in some of his operations, having been praised by an Austrian agent who worked with him in one case. In another case like in the 2023 death of Boopac Shakur, it revealed that internet vigilantism backfires when "The Hero" dies while claiming to investigate a sex trafficking allegation. This is one of the rare examples.

Extrajudicial killings of "rapists", "incels", and "child molesters"

These types of killings may get public support, but lead to paranoia from the accused vigilantes and "blame the hero" stories play out in court. Some of these people face life in prison, and the argument is that they did the right thing because they claimed to have spared other people from being victims. In some cases, they are carried out as a ploy for the killers to gain sympathy from the public. One example is the case of a vigilante group called Hercules that killed suspected rapists in Bangladesh in 2019. Another case is Rodrigo Duterte, who claimed that he killed rapists to curry political favor when he was the mayor of Davao City and President of the Philippines. It's a case of a real life Dexter Morgan getting elected into office.

In 2024 a Texas man named James Spencer III allegedly killed a convicted sex offender in 2023. According to the prosecutor and law enforcement, he allegedly lured a convicted child porn offender by claiming he was a minor, then made claims that law enforcement was not doing enough to stop sex offenders. As usual, law enforcement and attorneys had to argue about how the law does not give civilians the right to be judge, jury, and executioner.

See also

• Extrajudicial punishment
• Jack Idema, an American mercenary and vigilante who was jailed for running an illegal private prison facility in Afghanistan where he kidnapped and tortured local Afghan civilians for being suspected "terrorists"
• Militia movement
• Raffy Tulfo, a Filipino senator and journalist whose public service programmes where he intervenes with domestic and local disputes are criticised by some as a glorified form of vigilantism
• Whacker