Ordinary citizens — fed up with rampant crime and revolving-door punishment — are beating, burning, and killing in the name of justice.
Neighborhood Justice
There was a bad man in a bad neighborhood. His name was Pepito. Pepito was a slasher. He carried a 12-inch knife and kept it sharp. Once an old man named Benevar was walking along the street and Pepito stopped him to demand change for a dollar. Benevar said he didn’t have it. Pepito’s knife flashed, and Benevar lay mortally wounded, his head nearly severed. “The cut was so deep,” said a New York City detective who worked on the case, “that you could see his spinal cord.”
Not only was Pepito evil, he was ugly. Once he approached a beautiful young woman in the neighborhood and asked her to give him a kiss. Involuntarily, she recoiled in horror. Without warning, Pepito’s knife flashed, and the woman was beautiful no more. “I could see her teeth through her cheek,” the detective said. “He had cut part of her tongue off, that’s how hard he hit her with the blade of that knife.”
To be sure, they arrested Pepito. But the criminal justice system allowed Pepito to go free again and again. The police were frustrated. Citizens were terrorized and angry. Pepito was bolder than ever. He walked around brandishing his knife in full view, secure in the knowledge that the law was powerless to stop him.
Then one day the detective received a radio call. A man had been stabbed in the same neighborhood. Certain that this was another of Pepito’s victims, he rushed to the scene. But when he got there, the detective found Pepito himself lying in a spreading pool of his own blood. He had been stabbed a hundred times or more, and whoever had bothered to do such a thorough job had also left the 12-inch knife stuck in Pepito’s brain for good measure. “He had to go,” said a policeman who had been on the scene. “The neighborhood got together and did what we were unable to do. There was no question that it had to be done. In fact, I had resolved in my mind that the next time I took him in, I was going to put one in between his eyes. Nobody would have asked any questions. But the neighborhood people got there first, thank God. I’m a Catholic, and I didn’t want to make that decision.”
The good people who carried out Pepito’s execution are commonly known as vigilantes. And what they did is called lynching. Both words are charged with emotion, and yet it is difficult to find anyone in the neighborhood or among the police who is willing to say that what happened to him was wrong.
Pepito’s case would be a curiosity if it were isolated, but it is not. All over the nation, ordinary citizens fed up with incompetent, inadequate, or corrupt law enforcement and the criminal justice system are taking matters into their own hands. The power to make and enforce the laws in this nation is shifting at the grass-roots level, and those who philosophize about such matters are uncertain whether it signals a return to barbarism or is the first effective response to crime since the end of World War II. In fact, it is one of the most confusing and painful social issues of our time. For to kill Pepito is wrong, but not to kill him is impossible. Still the tale is so common as to be the stuff of legends.
In Skidmore, Missouri, Ken Rex McElroy was shot and killed in broad daylight, and no one was prosecuted. When news of his execution spread, observers as far away as the nation’s capital asked, “What took so long?” McElroy had terrorized the citizens of Skidmore in much the same way Pepito terrorized his New York neighborhood. He raped girls, murdered those who got in his way, and even burned down people’s houses if he felt like it. Released again and again, McElroy was emboldened by his own outrageous behavior and intoxicated by his seeming immunity to the law. The amazing thing is that the townspeople took McElroy’s abuse for 20 years before they got together and lynched him. Why? Certainly, it is one thing to shoot a man who is crawling through your bedroom window with a knife in his teeth — that’s called self-defense. It is entirely another matter to track him down and murder him, years after the fact, for a crime he committed against you.
We are now a nation of furious people. We have had it up to here and are not going to sit still for some high-talking analysis of freedom and liberty when it seems that the only people enjoying liberty are the most egregious sinners among us. There is a grand American tradition of going beyond the law in order to achieve a higher good. We’ve always liked the Lone Ranger, Rambo, Robin Hood, the Incredible Hulk — paramilitary, extra-legal heroes of the dark side living in a no-man’s-land between skirmish lines. It is no coincidence that fashion has taken us into the realm of paramilitary gear. From infants to high-fashion models, we are wearing fatigues, camouflage battle gear, cartridge belts, and military patches that say, “Blue Light” and “Top Gun. “The Guardian Angels are as successful as they are precisely because they capture that peculiar American spirit. They are the baddest of street gangs, but paradoxically, they are working for the greater good. They are kids who become superheroes when they put on that red beret.
Our overt symbols of aggression cannot simply be dismissed as a passing, accidental fad. They are expressions of our deepest (perhaps unconscious) feelings. And our feelings are rage at being violated for too many years. We are ready to strike back. Our mood of xenophobic hostility can be seen everywhere in the culture today, from bumper stickers that say, “If You Don’t Like My Driving, Get Off the Sidewalk,” to states that would like to become state-nations (“Don’t Mess with Texas,” “Live Free or Die”). But our current state of impudent fury goes beyond the traditional fascination with the outlaw hero. Rudeness is the social norm in America today. Nobody wants to be the good guy anymore, because nice guys finish last. If style could translate, into votes, we’d all drop the big one now.
The widespread popularity of adlib justice is like a revolution in miniature. It overthrows the elected government, if only for a wild and steamy evening. And as we know from our Latin neighbors to the south, all revolutions, even the ones. we foment through our C.I.A., carry certain risks. It’s like using dynamite to move mountains: You never know where the rocks are going to land.
“The surge of community activism on drugs is both a sign of hope and of danger,” said a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. The dangers are both theoretical and practical. In Miami in the first part of 1988, vigilantes burned down numerous houses — sometimes two or three in a single night — in a misguided effort to rid their neighborhoods of drug dealers. But firemen were injured and whole blocks where ordinary people lived were endangered. Vigilantes in Opalocka, outside Miami, killed two people in their zeal to banish drug dealers. Violent mobs have made venturing into Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood unsafe for anyone who is not a member of the close-knit Hasidic Jewish community, which by all accounts has become one of the most highly organized and vicious extra-legal vigilante groups in the country. The Hasidics are especially prone to attacking blacks, one of whom they beat so badly that he lay in a coma months after his encounter with vigilante justice. In Central Islip, Long Island, a man fired a shotgun into a crowd because he thought drug dealing was going on. In East Harlem, a man was beaten to death by a vigilante mob. They said he stole $20.
Philosophically and under the law, vigilantism in its strictest sense falls into the same general category as self-defense. In both cases, a normally law-abiding citizen is faced with a situation of dire stress or distress, of danger, personal or otherwise, and is pushed beyond the normal bounds of accepted behavior. At that point he says, “There’s something more important going on, and I have to take emergency action regardless of the consequences.” And so, if the case of Pepito were isolated, it would be justified. If a bear escapes from the zoo and goes roaming through the town, eating children, it is only right and proper for the townspeople to come out and shoot it.
Defense lawyer William Kunstler describes it this way: “It’s a fundamental urge of human nature. When the authorities will not assist, when somebody or something is a danger to your community or to individuals or to you, you can meet the danger yourself as you would have before there was law and order in the world. Most people will not have the courage to do it. When you get to deadly physical force, most people are rather reluctant to do it.”
That reluctance seems to be fading as traditional authorities lose control of the nation’s urban areas. Kunstler was sitting on an old green-velvet couch in his cluttered, booklined Gay Street office in Manhattan, behind barred windows. On the fireplace mantel there was a small stuffed bear with a message hanging around its neck. It said, “As long as Ireland is unfree, the only honorable attitude for Irish men and Irish women is an attitude of revolt.” Which pretty much sums up the attitude of urban Americans these days. The questions we must ask ourselves are these: Against whom are we revolting? Is our public expression of anger and frustration more in the nature of revenge than public justice? Will there be anything left of American democracy when we’re finished?
“What you’re getting back to is the same as medieval city-states armed against the barbarians,” says Kunstler. “You’ve created political divisions which protect themselves with armed men. We’re getting back to city-states at every level. As I’m talking to you, I’m looking at the bars on my window and the gates we have to lock. But this is general everywhere in metropolitan areas, where you have 14 locks on the door and people are buying illegal arms and learning how to protect themselves through karate, taking shooting lessons, learning how to ‘walk offensively.’ In other words, both the individual and the subdivisions of society are trying their best to survive, and they’re doing it in a hundred different ways.”
In another part of town — the heart of midtown — Thomas Reppetto, head of New York’s Citizens’ Crime Commission, agrees that angry people are rising up. A former Chicago cop, Reppetto climbed through the ranks and then went on to get a Ph.D. at Harvard and write a history of American police. Thoughtful and diffident, studious and tough, he is in a perfect position to observe the current epidemic of vigilantism, which he sees as the backlash to a crime wave that’s been building to tidal-wave proportions in America since the 1940’s. “Crime in America,” Reppetto says, “has turned around from something that you read about in the newspapers to something that happens to you. When little kids are getting hit by stray bullets, people are not going to put up with it. I’ve always thought of vigilantism, in the final analysis, as the failure of the official system. Four or five centuries ago, crime and vengeance was the norm. If you were wronged, it was your job, not the state’s, to get revenge. But in a modern urban society, you can’t have all this sword fighting in the streets and private vengeance. These things have to be done by government. And so, we in the Western world have settled on the principle that government will largely enforce the law. And now that’s beginning to break down. There’s a very good play about all this. Unfortunately, a love story gets into the center of it. It’s called “Romeo and Juliet.”
It is telling that Reppetto chooses the words revenge and vengeance, instead of the more current term, “correction,” used by the traditional police powers. Though our laws pretend not to be about vengeance anymore, revenge is what people want in the first place. They want it even more passionately when they see that the fantasy notions of justice that we are fed through the courts are not working to stop crime. And past a certain point, beyond a threshold of frustration, the people want revenge so badly that they are willing to break the law to get it. At that point the “good people” have lost respect for the criminal justice system. And when the people lose respect for it, it simply ceases to exist. We find ourselves, willy-nilly — like it or not — in a state of revolution.
In fact, confusion arises from the very use of the word vigilante. It means “vigilance” or “watchfulness,” and that would seem like a good thing. Watching out for one’s neighbors. Mutual support. But some fine distinctions need to be made. Vigilante action typically means action by a group. The group is ad hoc, and it works by consent. It forms and disappears so that it is not answerable, and it takes over the judicial, legislative, and executive powers of government-making the law, catching the suspect, convicting and sentencing him, and then executing the sentence, all in a day’s work. No separation of powers. That is precisely what the Founding Fathers sought to protect against with a system of checks and balances to give protection to all.
And yet whether we’re seeing true vigilantism or not is besides the main point that people are rising up in ones and twos and in groups, and what they want is not justice but revenge. Bernhard Goetz was an avenger. The shift is not from public to private justice, but from a criminal justice system to the ancient practice of revenge. Justice is a legal concept; revenge is a religious concept. So, it is no wonder that religion is at the heart of the present movement to public vengeance. Most people see this trend as a good thing, possibly because they mistakenly think it is simply justice in another form: If the police can’t take care of all this crime, we will. But it raises serious questions about the fundamental nature of our society. Can freedom and liberty survive in a climate of biblical revenge? What happens to the checks and balances that prevent abuses of power when power is transferred, ad hoc, to an untrained and untutored mob? Will that mob hold elections? Or will there be a peremptory ruling body composed of the winners of the street war? (That is how the gang wars in the big cities work, and how the Mafia has traditionally selected its leadership.) Have things gotten so bad that it’s time to admit that the American experiment has been a dismal failure these past 200 years, and we have to return to a more imperial style of justice where restricted freedom is the accepted norm?
Kansas City is a metropolis that is neither a hick town nor a crime capital. It is Middle America, both culturally and geographically. And yet it has one of the most active vigilante groups in the nation, the Ad Hoc Group Against Crime, which has fanned out and formed a liaison with police that is unlike any other. It is, in effect, the intelligence arm of the Kansas City police force. It doesn’t show up in the city budget and is answerable to no one. The local papers praise its actions; the people rally and march in support of the group. When Ad Hoc points a finger at a residence and says, “This is a crack house,” and organizes marches to picket the identified house, the town rises up against that place. The occupants of the house are not tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail — not yet.
Making the whole situation even more frightening to anyone who has a passing acquaintance with the concepts expressed in the U.S. Constitution (and especially its amendments), the local reporters fall in line with the vigilantes, bringing in a conviction based on the committee’s guesswork. On January 20, 1989, Ad Hoc got 250 people to march on a modest house at 3038 Wabash Avenue, and the next day reporters wrote, “But just because a suspected crack house has taken root in this otherwise tidy neighborhood, that doesn’t mean that it’s a bad area, residents said. It’s a stable community that prides itself on watching out for its own.” Notice the careful wording: “suspected crack house.” But it is an “otherwise tidy neighborhood.” Someone at the newspaper understood, if only vaguely, that he was doing wrong, and was trying to cover his tracks. But the citizens were justifiably afraid. They needed to do something. Like so many other vigilante cases, their questionable activities evolved after police had attempted to arrest drug dealers in the area but could not make a case. “What concerns me is the procedures,” says a neighborhood resident. “Why can’t they do any more about it?” The answer is found in the lessons learned in most fifth grade civics classes: They can’t do more about it because this is America, and we are all presumed innocent until proven guilty. And if we put away the procedures, we take a tiny step toward becoming a police state, which is what we were when the American Revolution took place to overthrow that police state.
Procedures — which some call checks and balances — are becoming a thing of the past. Although they are the foundation of civil liberties in this country — the basis upon which democracy was founded and the only assurance of its continued existence — more and more people are calling for doing away with procedures in favor of quick and ready justice — a rope, if that’s what it takes.
The Kansas City police like the Ad Hoc Group. “They are our eyes and ears,” a high-ranking police official told me.
I was riding shotgun with a police patrol in Kansas City one rainy afternoon, and as we passed up and down the hills, through poor and then poorer neighborhoods with starved trees and starving dogs and falling-down shingles, the police officer pointed out what he called crack houses. A typed list of addresses lay on the seat between us.
“How do you know these are crack houses?” I asked.
“People tell us,” he said.
It sounded so simple. If there’s anyone you don’t like, just tell the police they’re running a crack house. In the fifties it was Communism. In the thirties it was being Jewish. In Revolutionary times it was: Tell the British there’s sedition in that home.
I asked, “Why don’t we go into one of these crack houses?”
He said “sure,” and we called for backup and went right in. It was so easy, like being storm troopers. There we were, in some lady’s living room, with her children churning around the worn rug under our feet and her cousin sitting in a wheelchair, holding an infant and watching “General Hospital.” In the kitchen, on the tiny, dented stove, chicken was deep-frying in a flimsy aluminum saucepan; the house was filled with the smell of cooking. Armies of roaches swept back and forth across the yellow walls under a bare yellow bulb, and the children screamed and played up and down the narrow stairs.
The lady said she paid $52 a month rent. I couldn’t help wondering where all her cocaine profits were going if she lived like this. I suppose she could have a Swiss bank account. We left after giving her a stern lecture not to sell any crack.
Later, out on the street, the officer pointed out another crack house. Two men were coming out. I asked him if he thought the men were buying crack there. “We’ll see,” he said, and stopped his car in front of them, cutting them off as they came down the stairs. “Get your hands on the car,” he ordered, and the two men rolled their eyes heavenward, as if to say, Oh, man, who is this rube?
As the officer emptied their pockets, he fired off questions: Are you carrying any drugs? What were you doing in the house? Where do you live? Where do you work? Do you use drugs? Have you ever bought drugs there before?” The two citizens answered patiently, aware that they were in danger as the officer performed actions specifically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation [emphasis added], and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The authors were attempting to eliminate even the appearance of a police state. We, on the other hand, were in the process of reinventing the police state with our list of “houses of sedition” and our unwarranted searches. And that is the real danger of vigilante justice: It undermines democracy and erodes freedom.
Most people have no idea what a police-state is, so it is difficult to inspire in them the cold chill that even the hint of a police state ought to send rushing up the spine of anyone who values freedom. A friend of mine went to Yugoslavia for a year. He was a guest of the government there, a noted professor and a valued teacher. After he and his wife had been living for a few months in the comfortable house provided by the government, they noticed that every time they made a comment — for example, “Oh, I wonder if we could get that hole in the fence fixed” — the very next day, someone was out attending to it. At first, they were pleased and thought it was a happy coincidence. Later they understood that every word they said was being monitored. Soon they became nervous and self-conscious about what they said. After a time, they adjusted to censoring their own thoughts, lest they say something out of line. By the time they left Yugoslavia, they understood a police state very well indeed and couldn’t wait to get away from it. The police state means an end to privacy. It means that what you do in your bedroom, bathroom, basement, and even in your heart is fair game for police scrutiny.
We have not reached police-state conditions in America, far from it. But edging close to it, even by a small amount, is cause for alarm. It’s like edging close to smallpox. Once it catches on, there’s no stopping it. George Orwell put it this way in 1984: “The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.” The same could be said of Kansas City’s Ad Hoc Group Against Crime and all such sources of volunteer police intelligence. Our mass hysteria over drugs is like Orwell’s vision of thought control: “It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship.”
And, of course, it is precisely those people who are most naive about the dangers of their actions who are also most likely to participate willingly in the most dangerous actions, like children recruited into war. Orwell again:
“In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”
In other words, while vigilantes and pseudo-vigilantes think they are taking matters into their own hands — while they imagine that they are single-handedly righting the wrongs they feel have been done against them — they are unwittingly undermining their own freedom.
Many observers of this grass-roots movement believe that, in terms of where the nation is going, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The current rage of wild justice, vigilantism, and public revenge — fueled by popular fear of crime and misconceptions about the dangers of addictive disease — is apt to do a lot more damage before it goes away.
The San Francisco Herald editorialized in 1851, “Whenever the law becomes an empty name, has not the citizen the right to supply its deficiencies?” Riots and near martial law resulted. And as Robert Trojanowicz, director of the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University, wrote, “Early framers of the Constitution argued that periodic revolution was necessary to overthrow government tyranny. Part of the American psyche embraces the idea that when something fails to work properly, revolution is as valid a response as reform.”
Or is it? What about the homegrown response of inner-city blacks in the sixties? Riot police came out and put down those uprisings. Some cry to tear it all up, while others cry to burn it all down. The crime problem in the South Bronx has in part been solved because the South Bronx has all but disappeared from the face of the earth. Fort Apache is now called Little House on the Prairie; the neighborhood of rather large buildings has been flattened. Is that where the burners of crack houses are taking their neighborhoods?
In other words, when people rise up and take matters into their own hands, it doesn’t increase justice, nor does it tend to right wrongs. It only exaggerates a bad situation. The genuine problems lie deeper and must be dealt with on a deeper level. Vigilantism, rioting in the streets, ad hoc revolutions — all these are superficial responses that can only lead to oppression.
Some would have chaos instead. Attorney Barry Slotnick, who represented Bernhard Goetz, believes everyone should get a gun and take care of business himself. “Unfortunately, the police just don’t have the resources or the manpower to protect us all,” he said, “and as a result of that we have to resort to self-help, or we’re going to be under house arrest. We’ll be prisoners. And one thing I have proposed is that qualified cab drivers in the city of New York and every major city be allowed to carry a gun. What does that mean? It means now that a cab will be a secondary police force. We don’t have enough police. It’s not their fault.” Would you like your average New York City cab driver to make a fine distinction for you about what constitutes illegal search and seizure, or probable cause, or a reasonable use of force? I don’t even like policemen to do that, but at least they’re trained for it.
In another case, Slotnick represented pro bono East Harlem vigilantes who were accused of beating a young man to death for stealing $20. He had the charges dismissed and claims that the group did not assault the man — “They grabbed him and took him to the hospital, where he died,”
Slotnick said with a smirk. “They were just doing their duty as citizens.”
According to Slotnick, “People in this country are sick and tired of being molested and abused. And it’s time that we took back possession of what’s rightfully ours. And the vermin and predators that walk around preying on senior citizens and helpless people — they must be taken care of. And if it’s called vigilantism, then that’s the name of the game. Bernie Goetz wasn’t far wrong. I think Bernhard Goetz is a symbol of society’s right to fight back.”
William Kunstler, on the other hand, says, “Goetz was called a vigilante, but I thought the situation in his case was so unfraught with danger that it was a travesty of justice. I think that he was just a nut — an emotionally disturbed person who hated blacks.” Kunstler’s law firm represents one of the men Goetz shot with a handgun in a New York subway. “But still there is a legitimate point at which the public can take things into its own hands, and that’s always got to be an escape hatch in organized society — when the authorities aren’t going to do it and be a moral one. The threat has to be real, and the force used must be necessary.”
Certainly, one good reason that we should work for justice for all is that those among us who do not get justice will create their own, even if we don’t like them very much as people. That’s the “all men are created equal” part of the Declaration of Independence, which, though it has no legal status, ought to at least retain some sentimental value for those of us who cherish liberty.
The irregulars Alexander Hamilton wrote of in The Federalist were vigilantes such as those we see on our streets today. And he understood clearly why they were a danger to all, not just to the poor unfortunates who fall into their hands. “Safety from external danger is the most powerful director of national conduct,” Hamilton wrote. “Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates — To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.” This means that when we get scared (of crime, dope, Communists), we are far too quick to say, do anything you please, but take care of me.
We have to be brave to be free. Liberty is not for the faint of heart. People get away with more in a society that is founded on personal liberty — that’s part of the price of freedom. That doesn’t mean that we should sit back and accept all crime as inevitable, but it does mean we ought to be careful how much power we give to our police. We ought to consider the root cause of crime in our society. And we ought to look at so-called vigilante actions as the acts of people who are outraged and seeking revenge, seeking to vent their frustrations.
Is our whole society suffering from a malignancy? Sometimes it seems that the whole system goes topsy-turvy as citizens find themselves in a position of having to defend themselves against the defenders. “We serve and protect,” says the Chicago Police Department slogan. But those same Chicago police formed a death squad to execute Fred Hampton and Mark Clark one day back in the late sixties — a celebrated case. That’s no different from El Salvador’s National Guard That is one of the trappings of a police state: impromptu executions.
In 1986 Dallas police shot 29 citizens during the course of arrests and investigations. The Dallas police became so trigger-happy when it came to using citizens for target practice that a congressional investigation was launched. Interestingly, the police chief did not get up in front of the assemblage and say, “My God, this is terrible.” He denied that there was anything amiss.
Similarly, New York police have been known to form “death squads” when their interests were threatened.
“White communities look upon the police as servants,” William Kunstler says. “In the ghetto there’s a different attitude. They’re looked upon as an occupying army. And I think that’s what won the case for us in the Bronx.” Kunstler was referring to his defense of Larry Davis, not a particularly savory character. Kunstler evidently convinced the jury that Davis knew the police there were dealing drugs, and he was going to blow their operation. The police formed a death squad to execute Davis. But when they came for him, Davis fired back, wounding six police officers while making his escape. For several days, Davis was the object of one of the biggest manhunts in New York City history.
Kunstler says the people in the ghetto “understood the police very well. They understood what their real role was, and they were conditioned to believe that it’s possible for police to go out and try to kill somebody illegally. Most of the white jurors we asked said they didn’t believe that the police would ever do that or even run a drug ring. And the 77th Precinct was running a drug ring in Brooklyn. You have some policemen in jail for that now. It’s so easy for the police — who’s going to believe the drug dealer over the policeman?” The jury acquitted Larry Davis because (as they saw it) he was doing nothing more than protecting himself against a lynch mob. In other words. against some twisted form of vigilante justice. That particular form of vigilante justice is called a police-state.
Pepito’s case is wrong, because it is the first step toward the breakdown of the system of checks and balances that keeps the rest of us safe. There is an old saying: Two wrongs don’t make a right. As outrageous and inexcusable as Pepito’s actions were, lynching him did not make it right. Lynching him eroded, ever so slightly, the freedoms of that community, and signaled the police that the rules were suspended. Everyone was put on notice: We’re just pretending. We don’t really have to watch ourselves. We have unlimited power if we need it. And of course, as history shows us, unlimited power always corrupts.
The popular movement that some call vigilantism may come in many forms, but its meaning is always the same: suspension of the normal rules, a deviation from conventional law and order. It is, in other words, a precursor to a breakdown of the bonds of society, a partial dissolving of the walls of civilization. It is a step — albeit a tiny one — backward to barbarism.
Thomas Reppetto of New York’s Citizens’ Crime Commission says, “If they don’t get the violence under control in the streets of New York, you’ll get the military. Now whether that will help — I doubt it. But that’s what you’ll get.” As he was speaking, Washington, D.C., was seriously considering bringing in the National Guard to help staunch the flow of blood in the streets from a 1988 murder rate that made New York City look like Missoula, Montana.
Some people caught in the heat of a vigilante battle may say that this wild style of justice makes them more, not less, free. “To hell with the rest of the country,” they say. “Get those criminals off of my street by any means necessary, and my family will be more free in my neighborhood.” But they may not be seeing the whole picture. That attitude is akin to killing the bearer of bad news. A larger problem exists behind the immediate problem of street crime — it’s a problem with our society. A deep secret is about to come out if we are not careful. And the secret is this: People have to want to obey laws in order for the laws to work. Enforcement is a myth. Law and order in any society is an illusion created by the collective will of the people to create and maintain a state of peace among themselves. It is true now, and it has always been true in every society, that adherence to rules is a voluntary matter. Even in Iran, once under the iron fist of the Shah, in a society of harsh penalties and inflexible rules, when the people had had enough, they simply rose up and shrugged off the unwanted burden. And not even the finest machine guns the United States could buy for the Shah, nor the best-equipped standing army in the Middle East, could stop the throngs of people — they simply kept coming, through a hail of bullets arid tear gas, until the Shah fled.
No, enforcement is a myth. And until people address the underlying problem of why we stopped wanting to obey our own laws, no amount of vigilantism will bring America back on pitch again.
Lest we miss the point, let me reiterate clearly why we should be afraid of vigilante justice: In a situation where ordinary justice breaks down, we are encouraged to accept social controls that we should not be accepting. As we gradually give way to living in a police state of our own creation, we are lulled into a sense that we are protected, while in fact. we become the victims of our own device. One day we may pretend we are the police force; the next day we may be its victims. There is no freedom in an armed camp under siege. Where military rule reigns, everyone is a prisoner. That, of course, is the central problem with the so-called war on drugs. War is the end of freedom. And so, looking back on the ruins of our experiment with democracy, we may find ourselves in the same position of unintended irony that was expressed by the American in Vietnam who said, “We had to destroy this village to save it.”
