Vigilantism « Quotulatiousness

August 13, 2026

“Defund the police!” from around day five onwards

Filed under: Government, Law, Politics, USA — Tags: CrimeAndPunishment, ESR, Guns, Justice, Police, Progressives, Vigilantism — Nicholas @ 03:00

A grim joke I’ve seen many times on various social media sites features the kind of people who’d agree to defund the police, but not because they want to take it easy on criminals … but because if there are no police enforcing the laws, there’d be no police limiting “bag counts”. With no police to make arrests (and likely no jails or courts to provide some kind of due process), the victims of crime will either surrender to the perps, or get as fully armed as they can manage. You can’t maintain a civil society if everyone has to take on the policing role for themselves everywhere and at all times.

“Defund the Police” by Taymaz Valley – CC BY 2.0

I always laughed at “defunding the police”, because I know how that would go. The people who advocate it are incapable of thinking beyond first-order consequences.

So, let’s suppose major American city X fully defunds its police. How will this play out?

For a short time, criminals will have a field day. They will shoplift, rob, mug, and invade homes to their hearts’ content. Because who’s going to arrest them?

But then their victims are going to arm up. Homeowners, shopkeepers, and ordinary citizens will start open-carrying and shooting criminals. Because who’s going to arrest them?

So far, so good.

Now, here’s the part that isn’t obvious. 60% of index crimes are committed by Black people. Once the shooting phase starts, Black criminals are going to form gangs (if they haven’t already) so they can overwhelm individual targets.

Once Black gang predation becomes routine, the rational strategy for whites and Hispanics and Asians becomes to simply start gunning down groups of multiple Blacks on sight. Because who’s going to arrest them?

The same dynamic applies to any minority with a higher criminal propensity than white people. Which is basically all of them except for Northeast Asians.

Innocents will not be spared. If there are any left — it’s a statistical fact, for, example, that Black women have a higher rate of criminal violence than white men.

The eventual result would be a white nationalist’s wet dream. Minorities dead or keeping very, very quiet in order not to get shot. They might be able to hold mono-ethnic enclaves in the short term, but venturing outside them would be asking for death.

I’m pretty sure this is not what advocates of defunding the police want to happen. But these are the same people who were all gung-ho for police bodycams, and we all know how that turned out.

Update: You can always count on the Babylon Bee to provide timely and informative context for any issues we face in today’s complex world – What If We Abolished Prisons and Defunded the Police?

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March 17, 2020

When the state renounces enforcing the law, there are two alternatives

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, USA — Tags: CrimeAndPunishment, London, Police, Vigilantism — Nicholas @ 03:00

Yesterday, David Thompson linked to a post by Natalie Solent about how the police in London failed to do anything about a blatant theft at a Boots pharmacy because it was considered a “civil matter”. The accused thief was prosecuted privately by the parent corporation, which is apparently the first time this has happened in England. As Natalie says, this is the “nice” option when the government fails to enforce the law of the land — or enforces it only sporadically and unevenly.

In the latest edition of the Libertarian Enterprise, Eric Oppen provides an example from the US in the post-Civil War era that shows the other option for private law enforcement:

Many of the victims of the kind of small-time crime committed by vagrants and the “homeless” are, themselves, far from rich. Repeated thefts can drive a small, struggling business under, and loss of, for example, a bicycle can represent a catastrophic blow to a poor person’s finances. This doesn’t address the sense of violation felt by those victimized by crime.

The original San Francisco Committees of Vigilance formed because the “forces of law and order” either were not doing their jobs, or were actively in league with the very criminals they were supposed to be suppressing. Many police were incompetent or lazy, while others were often corrupt on a scale that would shock Boss Hogg.

Do-it-yourself justice was far from uncommon in nineteenth-century America, including in the “civilized” East. In upstate New York, after decades of unpunished crime, the Loomis family gang received an epic comeuppance in 1865. Fifteen years earlier, their outraged neighbors had tried staging a raid on the Loomis farm, but uncertainty about who owned the stolen goods they found prevented any Loomis from being convicted. In 1865, many of their neighbors were returned Civil War combat veterans. They had become inured to violence, and they were tired of the Loomis’ thefts, arsons and intimidation. They killed George “Wash” Loomis, the leader of the gang, nearly lynched one of his brothers, and burned down the family’s home. After that, the Loomis family’s power was broken and their reign of crime was pretty much over.

These things happened because there was no other way to deal with these situations. Law enforcement, in those days, was primitive, especially outside of the major cities. Large corporations often had their own private police simply because of this fact.

The “social contract” is supposed to read something like “renounce personally avenging your wrongs, and society will do it for you.” But what can one do, when society is visibly abrogating the contract? Take it to court?

Vigilantism is not unknown even in Canada.