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This is a review of the documentary covering a 'Town Bully' who had evaded authorities and continued to harm people repeatedly. In order to protect the communit
by SolaceQuantum 7y ago
This is a review of the documentary covering a 'Town Bully' who had evaded authorities and continued to harm people repeatedly. In order to protect the community, a group of vigilantes murdered them, and the community refused to issue any statements to authorities regarding anyone's involvement.
I think broadly, I wonder what the place of vigilanteism like this should serve. The sentiments to protect the community against a man who isn't being recieved adequate justice- this in my opinion seems to echo the justification of other movements I'm aware of. There's often community discouse online on what to do with known bad actors when moderatorship isn't adequate for example.
- leetcrew 7y agoit seems like a more extreme version of jury nullification. if it became widespread, it would essentially be the end of rule-of-law. but in isolated and rare situations, perhaps it's a beneficial escape valve? easy to suggest from my comfy office in a quiet suburb of course.
- vkou 7y agoIt's not a 'beneficial escape valve' when the community decides to, say, kill the n_______ who had the audacity to sleep with a white woman. Which is a far more common application of lynching. We should not be glorifying this.
- cyberbanjo 7y agoI dunno why you're being down voted but this is true. America is a lot more racist than the Bay.
- BrandonM 7y agoAre you implying that SF is a lot less racist than America is on average, or that there are places in America that are a lot more racist than SF?
- harimau777 7y agoRegardless of whether or not vigilantism is ever justified, I don't think that killing someone that has made a credible threat which law enforcement has shown they are unable to protect you against is equivalent to killing motivated by racism.
- vkou 7y agoLynching has always been driven by people reacting to what they believe was a credible threat, that law enforcement has failed to protect them from. In the historic case, that 'credible threat' was 'race mixing', uppity ______s, jews that were too well off for their own good, etc. When you let the most violent members of a small town community unilaterally decide what is, and what is not a credible threat, that is exactly what you will get.
- harimau777 7y agoSo in this case would you say that it was not a viable threat but was instead equivalent to being threatened by race mixing? To be clear: I am not saying that their actions were right, just that its not fair to compare them to something like racially motivated lynching.
- AndrewBissell 7y agoAre you comparing a townspeople who faced daily threats of actual violence from a pedophile bully, and who watched him routinely evade justice in the courts, to lynch mobs who executed random people of a certain skin color for looking at someone's daughter the wrong way? "Credible threat" has an actual meaning beyond just "whatever people think a 'credible threat' is".
- vkou 7y agoIt was credible enough to them that they would kill another human being over it. The whole point of a lynch mob is that you get to throw out any objective standard of credible threat, and replace it with a subjective, heat-of-the-moment one, proposed by the thugs leading it, who know they will face no accountability for their actions. That's what happens when you normalize lynching. Shitty people will happily use it as a weapon for injustice.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago"Beneficial" is probably too gentle a word. Vigilante justice is always bad. In this specific case, it was arguably less bad than the alternative, but that doesn't mean it's a good principle in general.
- 7raffic 7y agoIt's funny how many times black men having sex with white women had been brought up in this thread, while the article has nothing to do with black people, is it some sort of preoccupation?
- kelnos 7y agoThe world is not black and white. Sometimes something that's awful and terrible in one context is a necessary evil in another. I think that "physically terrifying (as in, can dead lift a couple hundred pounds like it's nothing) guy who has been convicted of multiple crimes but the police are too afraid/incompetent/paid-off to actually keep him in jail" easily crosses the bar of "I'm not going to feel bad if vigilante justice takes its course". No one's denying that terrible things have happened in the name of vigilante justice. But this is not the same thing. Justice spoke, but enforcement refused to do its job.
- pessimizer 7y agoGlorifying this in general is definitely bad for exactly the reason you said, but I think glorifying this case specifically is fine. This is a specific case in which legal process broke down, not a case in which there weren't laws that covered or should have covered the behavior of the victim. Law gets its privilege from the consent of the governed given based on its integrity, consistency, and gradual convergence to reflect the specifics of that consensus, not by basis of being designated "law." If the law isn't working, it will be abandoned. Laws on race were imposed from a larger consensus on race (federally.) There's no such consensus on defending bullies who are terrorizing their neighbors. Specifics matter.
- yummypaint 7y agoI think this is different. Jury nullification is about a lawbreaker not being punished. Vigilantiism is about an innocent person (innocent until proven guilty through judicial process) being punished. If we as a society have committed to the idea that option a is better than option b, then they seem more like opposites.
- leetcrew 7y agoI meant more from the refusing to witness side. people deciding as a community not to witness a killing seems like a similar kind of thing to a group of jurors (drawn from the community) deciding to acquit someone they believe is guilty. in both cases, it's an opportunity for the community to make a decision that falls somewhat outside the letter of the law. jury nullification has been used for both noble and quite ugly ends in the US.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoJury nullification can also be used to rescue innocent people railroaded by self-serving or corrupt prosecution that can manipulate jurors into believing their side of the story.
- PeterisP 7y agoRule of law is essentially about process for resolving disputes. In this case, it doesn't seem to be any dispute - it seems that the community had came to a consensus (almost unanimous if we discount McElroy himself and his wife Trena) about what how they wanted things to be.
- habitue 7y agoRule of law is not only about the practice of resolving disputes, though that's important, it's also about the belief that the process is what is used to handle criminals like McElroy. If that belief is shaken, it's much more damaging than if the system itself is a bit inefficient or corrupt but people still believe in it.
- PeterisP 7y agoI feel that this reverses cause and consequence - in this scenario it's not that this lynching would damage the belief in the legal process, but rather than the lynching happened because of (justified) disbelief in the legal process.
- rocqua 7y agoThere are two perspectives here. The outer perspective is 'should we condemn the actions taken here as outsiders'. The other, inner perspective is 'would you have participated in the killing, or at least be okay with refusing to testify against the killer?' I think it might be okay for the judgement of the situation from the different perspectives to be inconsistent.
- tootie 7y agoIt sounds like the justice system was either non-functional or corrupt. He committed plenty of crimes that should have put him away for a long time yet didn't. If government isn't serving the people appropriately then it gets replaced. Hard to say if it was really justified here. Maybe a call to the FBI would have been more productive.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoThere was a federal investigation, but without witnesses stalled.
- gwbas1c 7y agoI think it's just a symptom what happens when the rule of law fails