The Least Amount of Harm
On vigilantes, who venerates them, and why
In ways great and small, we are constantly reminded of life’s unfairness. Justice is elusive. We often feel powerless. We often are powerless. And so there is a certain allure to the vigilante, the person who decides to take matters into their own hands, the person who says “enough is enough. If no one else will do something about this injustice, I will.” Of course, we know that when people take justice into their own hands, the justice meted is inadequate and often self-serving. But still… the idea that there are means of receiving justice beyond the inadequate systems that shape our lives, is appealing.
Fictional vigilantes loom large in our cultural imagination. Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. Zorro, a caped crusader, defends the innocent from the corrupt. Batman, in all his iterations, grants Gotham the justice its police force cannot. In the Equalizer movies, Robert McCall protects the vulnerable and punishes evildoers. There are countless examples of vigilantes and more often than not, they are easy to celebrate. In their stories, there is a clear delineation between right and wrong though not everyone will agree on where that line is and on which side they stand.
But vigilantism is not only the stuff of imagination and fictive worlds. We are confronted by vigilantes all the time. When police commit extrajudicial murder, that is a form of vigilantism. In the heat of a moment, those officers decide to be judge, jury, and executioner. They decide that not only are they the law, they are also above the law and they are empowered to exact justice by any means necessary. The January 6th insurrectionists were vigilantes trying to preserve the presidency of a candidate voted out of office. George Zimmerman saw himself as a vigilante when he murdered Trayvon Martin even though Martin was just a teenager, walking home and not a criminal. Kyle Rittenhouse saw himself as a vigilante when he killed two men and injured a third during unruly protests in Kenosha, Wisc. Daniel Penny, recently exonerated from negligent homicide charges by a New York jury, choked Jordan Neely to death on the subway after Neely, mentally ill and homeless, made passengers uncomfortable as he ranted about being hungry and thirsty. All of these men have been celebrated by some and reviled by others. The only difference is what motivates those reactions.