Anabelle Kang L&S Social Sciences
Understanding Modern Police Vigilantism
Policing has been commonly understood as the use of legitimate violence by representatives of the state, while vigilantism has been conceptualized as the exercise of extra-legal violence. Engaging this basic distinction, scholars have theorized about the overlap between police and vigilantes by pointing to their jointly descended historical function (Hadden 2001), shared membership between police and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (Williams 2015), and self-deputized citizens who act as an appendage to the police (Maher 2021). However, recent investigations have brought attention to an unstudied development in the relationship between policing and vigilantism: the sustained, systematic execution and cover-up of vigilante acts by groups of police officers in their roles as on-duty officials. By examining a specific set of these such cases, I seek to understand: What institutional and cultural factors promote the growth of police vigilante groups? How might these groups complicate current literature on the relationship between vigilantism and policing?
Message To Sponsor
I could not be more grateful for the opportunity to begin my research this summer! I am thrilled that I get to devote more time to developing this project that I am deeply passionate about. This is an issue that many are intimately familiar with and have spent years demanding justice for, and I am eager to work towards a fuller understanding of this subject. Thank you!