Vigilantism, Again in the News, Is an American Tradition

These fears are reinforced by a president who seems to encourage division and fear between Americans, even as Black people’s voices are attracting more attention in the public and the halls of power.

Vigilantism Is American Law Enforcement
Through U.S. history, the distinctions between vigilantism and lawful arrest and punishment have always been murky. Frequently, vigilantism has been used not in opposition to police efforts, but rather with their active encouragement. Indeed, in some recent protests that still seems to be the case.

Before police departments existed, arrests were made under traditional common law, which depended on private participation in legally organized posses and serving as deputies. Institutions like slave patrols required that non-slave owners were willing to use, or at least permit, violence to maintain white supremacy. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, private detectives and security guards also possessed powers of arrest similar to those of police officers.

Even the spate of “stand your ground” laws passed in the last 15 years borders on vigilantism, giving private citizens lots of freedom about how to use force to protect themselves.

Vigilantism Is Also American Culture
American vigilantism is primarily associated with the terrible lynching campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that targeted Black Americans and other racial minorities. But that isn’t the whole story.

Political scientist Eleonora Mattiacci and I studied what were called “vigilance committees,” private groups organized in the decades before the Civil War that typically promoted anti-immigrant sentiment in areas, including cities, precisely as the laws concerning the powers of local governments were rapidly changing.

In fact, though it has been most often used to try to establish racial and economic hierarchies, vigilantism – including actual lynching – has also, at times, been used by disadvantaged communities for self-defense.

Take recent events in Milwaukee, for instance: A small gathering of people in a predominantly African American neighborhood violently confronted residents of a house where two girls were believed to be held in a sex-trafficking ring. This follows a long tradition of people of color using private force to protect themselves and defend their communities.

Vigilantism has often abetted the worst instincts in the politics of crime in the U.S., making justice appear to depend on what the people want rather than the rule of law.

But it is also evidence of the complicated relationship between violence and justice at the core of American democracy. The founders thought seriously about self and community protection and believed that popular participation in law enforcement and defense could be an important corrective to an unresponsive and oppressive legal system.

But allowing the majority to impose justice can have unequal effects on disadvantaged members of the nation, granting the police a mandate to act violently precisely because that seems to be what the people want.

As Americans focus on the way in which people of color, in particular, have been policed in this country, they should disentangle the damaging forms of vigilantism from a deeper notion that democracy might require ordinary citizens to rely at least partly on themselves to enforce the law.

Democracy requires Americans to somehow be vigilant over the use of force in their midst – without themselves becoming vigilantes.

Jonathan Obert isAssistant Professor of Political Science, Amherst College. This is an updated version of an article first published 9 July 2020.This articleis published courtesy of The Conversation.