Real Life Vigiliantes

A vigilante would probably be anti-Cop. He hopefully wouldn't attack the police, but tries to avoid him.

The fact that we don't have a RL version of the Punisher is a good sign that this can't happen.

What if the vigilante was allied with the police, sometimes being given "missions" by the police chief?
 

Nikephoros

Banned
What if the vigilante was allied with the police, sometimes being given "missions" by the police chief?

They didn't even really like the idea of vigilantes back in the Old West (although there were many, some tolerated). I couldn't see there being ones accepted/tolerated in a Modern-esque city.
 

Valdemar II

Banned
What if the vigilante was allied with the police, sometimes being given "missions" by the police chief?

IN thoe cases it would just become death squads, I imagine they could exist in some metropolian area, but they would be universal hated by their victims like Blacks and Latinos. In the end it will end with the police chief on the death row for mass murder.
 

Nikephoros

Banned
IN thoe cases it would just become death squads, I imagine they could exist in some metropolian area, but they would be universal hated by their victims like Blacks and Latinos. In the end it will end with the police chief on the death row for mass murder.

Most. Likely. Outcome.
 
There are some RL versions of vigilantes and vigilante groups in a limited fashion. In the 70's or 80's there was a guy who shot two gangbangers in the NYC subway, it was reputed that he was inspired by the "Deathwish" movies and was fed up with the extremely high crime rates, I forget if he went to jail or not, but he was arrested though. Also there were the Guardian Angels, they never actually killed anybody, they weren't a comic book style superhero group, more like a neighborhood watch on steroids. Then there is FSU, which is a gang in Chicago and Philadelphia, they don't really fight crime so much, but they do consider themselves "straightedge" and they do like to pick fights with skinheads.


As for actual real vigilantes like you see in the comic books, I could see something happening. Say you get a lot worse crime in the 70's and 80's, perhaps without the situation getting better as it did in OTL. Add in more government corruption, which isn't all that hard to imagine(hell look at Illinois.) So look for crime to get so bad and the government to get so unable to deal with it that regular people are faced with a situation where taking the law into their own hands is the only way to protect themselves from crime. Also public support would be unimprtant in my opinion, but wouldn't hurt to have.
 
^ That was my idea, too. Have the energy crisis toss the US into a 1930s-style depression, that the police for a while simply cannot handle. In parts of Canada, the US and a few other countries with wide-open sparsely populated areas (Australia, Brazil, South Africa and Argentina come to mind), police are called back to the cities to control the crime. The criminals come out in numbers, and enough good people have enough that you get vigilantes, who get guns and weapons and go out to stop the criminals.

Two examples come to mind: The video game Vigilante 8 and one episode of the TV show Dark Angel. The situations there are very different, and the results very different, but in both cases its examples of people taking the law into their own hands.
 
What if the vigilante was allied with the police, sometimes being given "missions" by the police chief?


During the 1980s & 1990s, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) formed a task force called the "Earth Angels" group, which was basically a death squad that was just as evil and corrupt as the gangs they were fighting. In East Oakland, California the police department established a series of vigilantes called the "Riders" in 2000, which sparked a series of extortion and racketeering, along with violent reprisals. The vigilantes turn out to be more akin to the characters on The Shield (FX-TV) and the film Training Day.

In both cases, the problem of crime is exasperated by the corruption that is caused by the vigilante culture. Second, many of the victims learn to distrust all law enforcement, thus leading to the "No Snitching!" mentality in many inner cities.
 
Personally, despite my seemingly negative contributions, I feel that such an AH has a lot of potential to be interesting. However, the end of the matter is that such an AH would almost certainly be a kind of dystopia. A dystopia with its moments of bravery and heroism to be certain, but still ultimately a world rife with ethical ambiguity, social strife, and one slowly but surely edging towards anarchism.
 
Isn't most US policing intensely localised? Run/administered and funded at the local county/borough/city level? I had always thought this was a strength of the US system, in that local policing resources are unlikely to ever be deployed far away despite wishes of local communities. Unlike in countries where policing is centralised, like in NZ - there is one police force for the entire country, which gets run from the capital, so national concerns can often trump local concerns
 
IN thoe cases it would just become death squads, I imagine they could exist in some metropolian area, but they would be universal hated by their victims like Blacks and Latinos. In the end it will end with the police chief on the death row for mass murder.

Well a lot of blacks and Hispanics are very anti-crime so wouldn't at least some of them support it? Also would they be as opposed to it if the vigilantes were also having missions against KKK, skinheads, and other racist groups?
 

Nikephoros

Banned
Well a lot of blacks and Hispanics are very anti-crime so wouldn't at least some of them support it? Also would they be as opposed to it if the vigilantes were also having missions against KKK, skinheads, and other racist groups?

A lot of them, if we want to generalize, don't trust the cops. How would they trust some random civilian vigilante?
 
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