Unless the law is enforced, a vigilante future beckons

Telegraph

19-02-2025

The return of the angels has long been considered a sign of the coming apocalypse. Times seem particularly millenarian at the moment and so to learn via a headline that 'angels are back on the streets of New York', did cause something of a double take. However, these angels are not the winged avengers of Holy Writ, but rather ordinary people. They still might be indicators of something apocalyptic.
In 1979, frustrated with rampant crime in New York City, Curtis Sliwa, a McDonald's night manager from the Bronx, founded a community policing group known as the Guardian Angels. Wearing their distinctive red berets, the 'angels' conducted subway patrols until improved policing rendered them unnecessary and, for some years, they were no longer needed.
However, following a series of appalling crimes on the subway system, the Guardian Angels have returned to New York. In one harrowing incident, a woman was set ablaze and bystanders filmed rather than intervened.
A broader revival in vigilantism is visible across the West. In Britain and Australia, self-appointed groups of paedophile hunters have long filmed 'busts' after entrapping predators online. In Hall Green, Birmingham, a group of fathers are organising to 'police' the area where 12-year-old Leo Ross was stabbed to death last month, vowing to make 'citizens' arrests' if necessary.
Last November, an asylum hotel abruptly opened in Warwick, with nearby residents given less than 24 hours notice of the sudden influx of 360 migrants. Following reports of men loitering around a nearby school, concerned locals began organising community patrols.
Such things are no doubt happening elsewhere, and will continue. The Government, despite promising to end migrant hotel use, has just extended their contracts for another four years.
At the 'milder' end of the crime spectrum, we see middle-class vigilantes chasing after their stolen bikes in the face of police inaction. The phenomenon is visible too in the surge in personal CCTV and private security in shops. A fifth of households now have some form of doorstep security, like a video doorbell.
The rise of vigilantism results from a breakdown of trust in the police. This began with mistrust in politicians but as the apparatus of the state came to be politicised, the mistrust has expanded to the state apparatus too. In October 2024, 52 per cent of UK adults told a YouGov survey that they had 'no/not very much' confidence in the police to tackle crime locally, compared to 39 per cent five years earlier. The surprise is that trust remains as high as it does.
We have a fatal combination of front-line incompetence, particularly on so-called 'minor crimes' where most people experience policing, accompanied by obvious discrepancies in law enforcement.
Last summer saw two murders at the Notting Hill Carnival. Would politicians speak in such glowing terms about any other annual event that routinely featured such violence? In many areas two-tier policing is no longer a conspiracy theory but an observable fact of life. Following the sentencing of a Manchester man filmed publicly burning the Quran, the judge's summing-up remarks referenced the book's sacred nature to Muslims; suggesting the existence of de facto blasphemy laws.
We may be heading towards vigilantism with echoes of Northern Irish sectarianism; with an extreme breakdown in trust, communities begin policing themselves.
Since my partner moved to a leafy Cotswold town, I've had the eye-opening experience of comparing daily life in London to the sort of high-trust community where parcels sit untouched on porches for hours and residents sometimes leave their doors unlocked all day. The contrast is startling. Though I live in a medium-crime area by London standards, police have still knocked more than once to ask if we'd seen anything suspicious following a stabbing.
Parcels are so likely to go astray that I no longer order anything to my home. When your neighbourhood is visibly 'in decline', with ubiquitous fly-tipping, litter and noise pollution, each small outrage makes you that bit less generous, less civic-minded.
It is quietly radicalising to tap your bus fare, only to see scores of young men push through without paying; a regular occurrence for many commuters. There are still parts of Britain (and London) that remain high-trust, but this generally has nothing to do with the police. Which, ironically, supports the vigilante logic.
Both the initial law-breaking, and the vigilantism, are symptoms of a wider issue, which is the state's unwillingness, or inability, to enforce decency; the binds that keep civil society together when people's willingness to do it off their own backs disappears. The two are mutually-reinforcing. Person A doesn't trust Person B to keep the rules, Person B knows the police won't enforce the rules, Person A then doesn't trust the police to step in when that breakdown of trust affects their lives.
Multiculturalism has sometimes resulted in communities with different understandings of what civil society looks like, even what occupying public space looks like, living cheek-by-jowl.
There are examples of this difference being harmonious, of common ground being found; the UK's high rate of interracial marriage attests to this. However such positives can only succeed when there are also clear consequences when things go the other way. The state, with its monopoly on violence, must be ready, willing and able to step in and enforce some sort of universal rulebook – or Britain's vigilante future will be assured.