Shadow Vigilantes

by Paul H. Robinson

  The Animal Liberation Front

  Beginning in the 1960s, animal rights activists work to raise public awareness concerning the improper treatment of animals. There is often a good deal of public outrage against the kind of animal cruelty that the activists expose. This exposure includes not only describing the torturous treatment animals undergo when they are raised for sale for food but also exposing instances of abuse in laboratories, such as baby chimpanzees locked inside steel boxes or an infant monkey with its eyes stitched close for a blindness experiment.6

  In the 1970s hundreds of US-based groups campaign on behalf of animal welfare. In many cases, such advocacy leads to new legislation and some levels of incremental change. However, for some members of the animal rights movement, such change is too little and not fast enough.7

  The Animal Liberation Front (ALF) represents the more extreme end of the movement. It focuses on “direct action,” a euphemism for committing illegal acts of varying degrees of violence in order to save animals or otherwise convey the group's message. Although the exact year the ALF starts operations in the United States is unclear, as early as 1979 individuals who identify themselves with the ALF and its mission break into New York University Medical School and release animals.8 This is followed by a spate of similar incidents, some violent.

  According to the Department of Justice, between 1979 and the present, ALF-affiliated individuals are responsible for more than fifteen hundred incidents of trespass, vandalism, arson, and thefts committed in the name of animal rights. The damage they have caused, primarily arson, is well into the millions of dollars.9 Other forms of violent action include sending letters booby-trapped with razor blades to scientists affiliated with research using animals, and the use of improvised incendiary and explosive devices against property and, occasionally, against the homes of researchers.10 In 1987 ALF members set a veterinary lab on fire at the University of California, Davis, and in 1992 ALF members, including an activist by the name of Rod Coronado, firebomb a research lab in Michigan.11

  Researchers are also threatened, leading them to request a temporary restraining order against ALF sympathizers who publish names and addresses of researchers to help target them for harassment. The group also breaks a window in a researcher's house and floods the ground floor of her home, and it sets multiple explosive or incendiary devices under researchers’ cars or at their front doors.12 In other instances, ALF members have contacted researchers using animals for their research, stating, “Let this message be clear to all who victimize the innocent [animals]: we're watching. And by axe, drill, or crowbar—we're coming through your door. Stop or be stopped.”13

  Fig. 7.2. Animal Liberation Front poster advocates illegal action to aid animals. (Courtesy of Flickr.com)

  The ALF rails against the general public and particular targets for engaging in “speciesism.” One member explains that speciesism is “the belief that nonhuman species exist to serve the needs of the human species, that animals are in various senses ‘inferior’ to human beings, and therefore that one can favor human over nonhuman interests according to species status alone.”14

  Continuing support for the ALF is made possible by a public relations branch that acts within the bounds of the law to provide information about ALF deeds and propaganda for the cause of animal activism. These websites speak of “direct action” actors in laudatory terms and compile reports on aggregated instances of direct action on a semiregular basis. The organization also publishes various forms of materials intended to assist individuals interested in the ALF's movement: one ALF activist who has been arrested for arson has with him an ALF-created document that states that violence to protect animals is justified, nonviolence should be rejected, and actors should “use any and every tactic necessary to win the freedom of our brothers and sisters. This means they cheat, steal, lie, plunder, disable, threaten, and physically harm others to achieve their objective.”15

  As part of its online media campaign, the ALF also publishes guidelines on how to do the following: engaging in “direct action,” avoiding prosecution, jamming locks, and making improvised explosive devices. The guide is provided both as a technical manual and as a summary of the ideological position of the group while also exhorting its members to participate in live animal liberations at laboratories, fur farms, and factory farms.

  The ALF and affiliated actors and cell groups continue to operate, for example, by torching a dozen cattle trucks in Fresno, California, in 2012. The ALF states that “despite guards, a constant worker presence and a razor wire fence, the enemy is still vulnerable. There is a lot of stuff that needs to be destroyed, and we can't count on spontaneous combustion and careless welders to do all the work.”16

  The public abhorrence of cruelty to animals and the government's apparent failure to prevent it helped animal rights activists gain some initial support. And that support in turn helped the activists justify their initial use of vigilante action, which continued even when their program expanded well beyond the notion of animal cruelty condemned by the larger community. It is not an uncommon dynamic. Once a group passes the signpost of the majority view, it is not difficult to drift further and further from the mainstream. (This, of course, was one of the reasons in support of the majority-rule requirement set out in rule 9 in chapter 5.) In most cases there is no single obvious idea that distinguishes the nearly majority view from the extremist splinter-group view.

  It is no surprise that this problem regularly arises in the context of vigilante action. The people most inclined toward vigilante action are people who usually have a greater motivation to act because they have an exaggerated view of the importance of the interest that they promote. Alienated people often feel that they have less to lose when they reject the status quo. With strong beliefs comes an exaggerated sense of the importance of the government's failures. In the case of the animal rights activists, for example, it is their exaggerated view of animal rights that both motivates them to vigilantism, which the community might initially support, and propels them to extremes that the community does not support.

  INSPIRING OUTSIDE EXTREMISTS

  The unhealthy relationship between vigilantism and extremists appears in other forms as well. Even if a vigilante group stays within the boundaries of what society considers moral action, its lawbreaking conduct may inspire others outside the group to go far beyond those bounds. No matter how scrupulous the group is about remaining moral, its members may have little control over those who see their example and are moved to act in more extreme ways. Indeed, the stronger the group's public credibility, perhaps earned by staying within moral bounds, the more inspired outside extremists may be, believing through magical thinking that they too are cloaked with the mantle of moral justification. Consider two examples.

  Project Perverted Justice

  In 2002 a group of computer-savvy volunteers, led by a man adopting the nom de guerre of Xavier Von Erck, form Project Perverted Justice in the belief that pedophiles are using expanding web technologies to better lure children for abuse. Consisting of former abuse victims, retired law enforcement officers, and civilian volunteers, the group finds and monitors online chat rooms where pedophiles are trying to make connections with teenagers. Once they identify a trolling predator, group members seek to embarrass him with his spouse, family, employers, or the community by posting his chats with the teenage girls. More aggressive forms of action include arranging to meet the man and filming his embarrassment when group members, rather than a young teen, appear for the meeting.17 (Dateline NBC's wildly successful reality TV show To Catch a Predator was in partnership with the group.)

  In one instance, a twenty-nine-year-old Portland, Oregon, man surfs Yahoo! chat rooms in which teenagers hang out. He strikes up a conversation with “misspunkgirlie13,” who identifies herself as a fourteen-year-old Portland girl. The man quickly steers the conversation toward sex. “I'm 29, your [sic] 14 and adorable,” he writes and then continues flirting.18 He emails her a p
hoto of his penis and a pornographic video and arranges to meet later at her apartment once her mother has gone.

  The man drives an hour to the girl's house, where he is greeted not by a fourteen-year-old girl but rather by two large men with baseball bats and a camera. They chase him back to his minivan and scold him for soliciting sex from a young girl as they film his flight. By the end of the day, the group has posted the man's contact information along with the chat conversation and the retreat video to its website, Perverted-Justice.com.

  The organization allows anyone ensnared by one of its ruses to post a reply letter justifying his actions. Most men swear that they have learned their lesson and just want the site to take down their information so others will stop harassing them. A twenty-year-old trapped by the group complained, “People pm [private message] me all the time and tell me that they are going to find me and hurt me, threaten to kill me, and etc…. i cry at night sometimes cause i fear for my life, since people seem to see what I look like, im very scared.”19

  Group members have been accused of falsely representing themselves and of endangering those persons whom members publicly claim to be pedophiles. Some critics also accuse the group of endangering the lives of the very children it claims to protect by bringing the predators into the neighborhoods. And since the aggressive tactics rarely result in convictions, at least according to some law enforcement officials, the actions only lead to embarrassment but not incarceration of the would-be assailants. Police investigators undergo extensive training on how to chat online with potential offenders in a way that will build a strong criminal case. Perverted Justice volunteers do not undergo any such training, nor does the group perform background checks on any of the participants.

  Authorities caution the group not to make law enforcement's job more difficult. Sgt. Nick Battaglia, head of a child exploitation unit in San Jose, California, says, “Their hearts are in the right place, but the law needs to be enforced by someone who is qualified to enforce them. They need to be very careful…. If they're insinuating that someone is committing a criminal offense and putting their photograph and personal information online, they could be held liable in a civil suit.”20

  As of 2017 the group claims that its actions have led to six hundred chat-based convictions and that it has information-sharing agreements with hundreds of local police agencies, as well as the Department of Homeland Security.21

  While people may disagree about whether the Project Perverted Justice program is ultimately beneficial or harmful, it is clear that its publicity elevates the public's emotional level of outrage against child sex abuse, and, most importantly, many people will see it as demonstrating that citizens can be as effective as law enforcement in exposing pedophiles. In seeming to legitimize such citizen conduct, the group is that much more likely to inspire more extreme conduct by others.

  In 2005 Michael Anthony Mullen, incensed by a recent case he had heard about, pretended to be an FBI agent and arranged to “interview” three sex offenders living together in Whatcom County, Washington. When one of the “interviewees” left the meeting, Mullen shot and killed the other two.22 His actions could inspire others to take similar extreme methods.

  Operation Rescue

  Although abortion is legal in the United States, it remains a highly controversial issue: some consider abortion to be a matter of free choice and women's rights, while others see it as little more than state-sanctioned murder of unborn children.23

  Among the more militant groups is Operation Rescue, a pro-life protest group founded in Texas by Randall Terry in the mid-1980s. Terry and Operation Rescue are known for illegal protests in front of abortion clinics and for training individual pro-life advocates in “boot camp” to turn them into the “shock troops” of the pro-life movement. The training includes instruction on how to trace license plate numbers of clients and doctors at the clinics, how to jam their phone lines, how to picket, and how to videotape those who enter clinics. The group is also known to deliberately block entrances and display grisly photos and exhibits of dead or aborted fetuses to those who visit the clinic.

  In the 1990s midterm abortions are controversial, but of particular concern are late-term abortions. Performed in the last trimester of a woman's pregnancy, late-term abortions require what many see as a horribly cruel procedure. A flashpoint of the debate is Dr. George Tiller, an abortion doctor at a clinic in Wichita, Kansas, who is one of the few medical professionals in the country willing to provide the controversial procedure at the time. Tiller performs such procedures rarely, typically for reasons that include the health of the mother or development issues of the unborn fetus.

  Furious at Tiller's apparent willingness to commit murder for profit, as they see it, Operation Rescue members target Tiller and his clinic. In 1991 Operation Rescue organizes an event called the Summer of Mercy, during which members plan to shut Tiller's clinic down by blocking entrances and harassing those who enter. The group also keeps close tabs on Tiller and the clinic's patients and staff to the point where pro-life protesters boast that “we know when Tiller's using the bathroom.”24

  Their tactics include near-constant day-and-night harassment by protesters, which leads the clinic to seek legal and law enforcement help. Nearly forty police officers have a full-time job trying to keep the pathway to the clinic's entrance open.25 As a result of the protesters’ refusal to obey police orders, a federal district court issues an injunction against the protesters on July 23, 1991, but they ignore it. The next day, protesters crawl under Tiller's van, preventing him from entering the clinic's driveway.

  For nearly six weeks, Operation Rescue defies federal court injunctions and blockades the clinic, doing everything from chaining themselves to fences to bussing in protesters every morning. Protesters are not deterred by arrest; some activists are jailed six times in the course of the protests, while many protesters have to be physically carried away by police officers. By the time the protests end, nearly twenty-six hundred people have been arrested for blockading the clinic. In total, the mass protest prevents twenty-nine abortions and lasts forty-two days. Tiller's clinic does not cease operations.26

  During the protests, participants are usually released on their own recognizance and simply rejoin the human blockade, so Wichita enacts a city ordinance imposing a two-thousand-dollar bail for individuals blocking access to local businesses. In 1994 federal authorities enact the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.27 The FACE Act makes it a federal offense to block access to a clinic entrance by means of intimidation, threat or actual use of force, or physical obstruction; it also increases penalties for blocking clinics from two to three days in jail in most cases to up to eighteen months in jail and a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fine. As a result of the FACE Act, as well as Supreme Court cases of the same period, illegal blockades cease to be a workable strategy of the pro-life movement. Operation Rescue abandons the tactic.

  Operation Rescue continues to issue its heated statements condemning Tiller and other abortion providers, and it continues to run a boot camp for its members and other pro-life protesters in the hopes that they will “go home and make babykillers’ lives miserable.”28 The group also issues “wanted posters” of abortion providers, supplying names, pictures, and addresses of abortion doctors to pro-life advocates. No longer able to blockade the entrance to Tiller's facility, activists stalk him, search his trash, harass his employees by providing their identities to local businesses, and confront Tiller at his home and church.

  Although Operation Rescue itself is not implicated in overt violence, its inflammatory rhetoric inspires others more inclined toward violence.29 In a 1993 assassination attempt, Tiller is shot twice by a woman with ties to antiabortion groups. Scott Roeder is another militant inspired by Operation Rescue. He is a donor to the organization who posts on its online message board. In 2007 he calls Tiller's clinic “the concentration camp of Mengele of our day [who] needs to be stopped.”30 In May 2009 Roeder confronts Tiller i
n the lobby of Tiller's church, where he is serving as an usher, and shoots him in the head, killing him instantly.

  The original organizers of Project Perverted Justice would no doubt be appalled at the notion of murdering a sex offender. Should they have known, however, that their highly public campaign might stir up all manner of backlash against sex offenders? (Recall the Pittsburgh prison guards in chapter 5 who were similarly inspired.) Even if organizers understood this possibility, should it invalidate their moral justification for stepping in because they believe that the government has failed to take seriously its obligation to protect its vulnerable children and teenagers?

  But Operation Rescue presents an importantly different case. Its organizers’ public rhetoric might be taken as inviting extremists to do more than what the organization itself is willing to do and as indicating to extremists that they have the organization's private approval even if not its official public support. This seems a stronger case for holding the organizers morally accountable for the subsequent murder of Tiller.

  As the cases in this chapter make clear, there is no substitute for the government providing protection and doing justice. Under the right circumstances, vigilantes can do it with good short-term results and perhaps even in a moral way, but the larger society will often suffer. The only solution to the problem is for the government to take more seriously its moral obligation to hold up its end of the social contract and to avoid at all costs putting citizens in a position where they must be moral vigilantes if they are to obtain protection and justice.

  The loss of moral credibility through perceived gross failures of justice can provoke ordinary people (chapters 8 and 9 below) and officials within the criminal justice system itself (chapter 10) to take action to force from the system the justice that the system seems reluctant to impose. And, as we will see in part IV, the manipulations and distortions of the system by which this is done—through what might be called acts of shadow vigilantism—commonly provoke their own distorting response, leading to a downward spiral of disillusionment and subversion (chapter 11).