There is a story in the UK media (see here for the Daily Mail version) about how local residents in the Bournemouth area of southern England have banded together to form “vigilante” groups – working with local police, it should be noted – to deal with crime.
When temperatures hit the mid-30s last month, brawls broke out in broad daylight, while a woman in her late teens was raped in a beachside public toilet just days later leading to the arrest of a man who has now been released on bail.
And many residents have had enough, with more than 200 volunteers including security professionals and first aiders signing up to the Safeguard Force to tackle the tourist hotspot’s descent into lawlessness.
The group, set up by local businessman Gary Bartlett, aims to ‘protect the most vulnerable in our town – especially women, children and the elderly’.
They have already raised more than £3,000 through a GoFundMe campaign to buy body cameras, stab vests and radios.
It would be easy to focus on the continued degradation and decline of the UK, the nastiness, nihilism, scruffiness and genuine shitty state of it all. Reeves. Starmer, etc. But I want to take a slightly different tack.
The tack – hauling in the mainsail, lads! – is that this shows that when pushed sufficiently, people can and do band together to bring certain outcomes about, and seek to frustrate others. A few weeks ago I re-read, after many years, Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous book, Democracy in America. He noted the enthusiasm with which American citizens formed associations of all kinds, from the frivolous to the deadly serious. Around the time he wrote that book (in two volumes, the first was completed in the 1830s, the second in the 1840s) the UK had gone through the experiment, under Sir Robert Peel, of forming official police forces, starting with the Metropolitan Police, aka “The Met”. His principles of how a police force should operate are still referred to. In the 18th and 19th centuries there were societies for the “prosecution of felons” – a classic case of a private provider of a “public good”.
There is, in most developed countries, a sort of social compact: The State will take on the role of seeking to catch and deter criminals, and in return, the citizens will abjure the freedom to take the law into their own hands. This compact has to work to a certain level of effectiveness. When police become distracted by politically motivated rubbish, such as “non-crime hate incidents” and so forth, and morale is damaged (many coppers have left the forces, because they are angry about such nonsense), you get a problem. Crime clear-up rates are low; I come across complaints that people rarely bother to log crimes out of cynicism that not much will be done. And then there are worries that crimes against persons and property appear to be treated more leniently than fashionable concerns. Result: the compact is fraying to the point of breakdown.
And so we have what is happening in Bournemouth. This will spread. I can expect to read more articles about people learning self-defence, increased community patrols, and controversies about what the limits are in being able to enforce laws. (It is worth remembering that at this point, it is legally difficult for UK citizens to use lethal force in self-defence.)
Nature abhors a vacuum, in public policy as much as anything else. There are going to be consequences. Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” are going to be more in evidence.
