Violence, Vigilantes, and the Tragedy of Trayvon Martin

So much has been written and said about Trayvon Martin that I worry I can't say anything new. That the killing is tragic is obvious, that it was senseless seems clear to me too. I have no shortage of opinions on or anger against George Zimmerman. A ton has already been put out there about gun control and racism, more than I can either cover or adequately contribute to. Instead, I'd like to take a few paragraphs to speculate on the circumstances that make us want to take matters into our own hands. If the following seems to forget the inherent tragedy, I'm sorry. Possibly it's because I don't think I can do that part of it justice. But I do think I can say something about our relationships with institutions and how it instructs our senses of crime and justice. What would drive an electorate to enact something as radical as Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, or to form an armed Neighborhood Watch, or - tragically - kill an innocent person while on that watch's patrol?

Looking to both our history and our fiction, some patterns emerge about vigilantes, self-help, and extra-legal justice. Let me suggest at the outset that, as a general matter, we turn to these measures when we find weakness or fault with our formal institutions. If "The Law" cannot or will not do what we want it to do, we find other ways to get done what we think needs to get done. Let me start with a quasi-historical example. What happens when the police won't take care of your people? If you belong to an ethnic group that gets ignored, that doesn't get fair legal protection? This happens:

I'm not exactly a mafia expert, and there are any number of explanations for the rise of the Italian-American branch (not least being the influx of immigrants affiliated with the Sicilian originals). But part of the emergence of protection rackets is the need for, well, for protection. The Irish in Boston and New York felt cut out of the formal institutions of law and politics, and lo and behold Irish gangs emerge. 

Consider too cases where battered wives kill their abusive husbands. Part of what constitutes Battered Woman Syndrome is a belief that your husband is untouchable, that the police cannot or will not intervene on your behalf. In such situations, with their backs against the wall, abused women take matters into their own hands and kill their husbands. I'm not saying either that they shouldn't have or that their husbands deserved it, but rather that something that contributes is the belief that the formal institutions of law cannot be trusted to bring about the appropriate outcome. 

This doesn't necessarily imply that the institutions are weak. In the case of battered wives, the police department may be quite strong, but (at least perceived as) unresponsive. Moving back to fiction, think about Unforgiven. Gene Hackman's sheriff isn't weak, he runs the town with an iron fist. But his concept of appropriate punishment for the men who mutilate a prostitute at the movie's outset doesn't mesh with what her friends and co-workers consider just or fair. The result?

They get together a purse and hire bounty hunters to track down and kill those responsible. In the face of an institution they believe is unresponsive to their calls for justice, they take matters into their own hands and aim to achieve the result they think best represents justice. 

This is reflective of a fairly common practice in the early days of our Republic and on the frontier, what Larry Kramer has termed "popular constitutionalism." When a judge handed down a punishment that was considered too light, too heavy, or not in accordance with popular perception of the Constitution, mobs would release prisoners from jail, or - in the opposite scenario - hang them. Yes, vigilante justice, but not unprincipled vigilante justice. It was popular interpretation of what the dictates of law and justice demanded, and seen as a corrective for the failures of formal institutions. 

This trope is popular not just in Westerns  - though I could rattle off half a dozen Westerns premised on violence and vigilantism and faulty institutions without batting an eye - but all over fiction. What do the following have in common?

They all responded to corrupt/weak institutions by providing their own brand of justice. In fiction it's tended to be men, but not exclusively:

In movies, fiction, and history, violent self-help and vigilantism are often responses to weak, rigid, corrupt or unresponsive formal institutions. Police can't get the job done? Step into their shoes. 

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us back to Trayvon Martin. I don't want to speculate too much about George Zimmerman, but his history of 911 calls and the specifics of the call he made before ignoring the advice of police and shooting Trayvon Martin strongly suggest that he felt the police were not doing what he felt they ought to do. In this case, it seems clear - at least to me - that Zimmerman's view was uninformed, inflected by racist beliefs, and amped up by delusions of grandeur. That he didn't even have to spend a night in jail is utterly inexcusable, and that Florida's law claims to be incapable of punishing such happenings tragic, misguided, and dangerous. We should be having the conversations we are having, about racism, gun-control, self-defense, etc. 

I hope, however, that we don't lose sight of the institutional angle. I suspect that many people who supported the Stand Your Ground law in Florida did so because they felt they needed to be able to take matters into their own hands more. I think the Neighborhood Watch to which George Zimmerman belonged was formed in part because its members felt the police weren't doing enough to protect them. And I feel certain that George Zimmerman felt the police weren't doing their jobs (whether he's wrong, and whether his views are as impacted by racists beliefs as I suspect doesn't change the fact that his perception of this truth contributed to the tragedy).

In political science, we tend to define "the state" as the monopoly holder of legitimate coercion and force. But anecdotally and historically, this isn't especially clear; I don't think it passes theoretical muster, frankly. And we ought not to ignore the fact that people step in to correct perceived institutional problems. If we do, we ignore the motivations of the world's George Zimmermans, and run the risk of more tragedies like that of Trayvon Martin.