When Vigilantes Take Over
Communities often support extrajudicial justice, with undesirable results.
When campaigning for the Philippine presidency last spring, Rodrigo Duterte promised to kill so many criminals that “fish will grow fat” in Manila Bay from feasting on their corpses. Since taking office on June 30, Mr. Duterte appears to be meeting that grisly goal. Over 1,800 people have been killed by the police and vigilantes, and the killings show no sign of subsiding.
Many of the victims appear to have been innocent, and none had been proved guilty in a court of law. But the crackdown has struck a chord with the public, and Mr. Duterte’s popularity has been soaring.
What drives this explosion of extrajudicial violence — which bears striking parallels to previous waves of killings in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Thailand and elsewhere?
This is not a simple story of good versus evil, with the villain — whether enforcers like Mr. Duterte or the criminal elements they claim to be expunging — solely responsible. Social scientists say the real story is more complicated, and more tragic. It is often the affected communities themselves that help create the circumstances for this violence.
It tends to begin, the research suggests, with a weak state and a population desperate for security. Short-term incentives push everyone to bad decisions that culminate in violence that, once it has reached a level as bloody as that in the Philippines, can be nearly impossible to stop.
It might seem that the Philippines’ trouble began when it elected Mr. Duterte, who has for decades advocated extrajudicial killings as a legitimate method of crime control. But the roots of the problem can be traced to the administration of Mr. Duterte’s predecessor, Benigno Aquino III. Mr. Aquino failed to fix the Philippines’ corrupt and ineffective justice system. And he was perceived as unwilling to solve the country’s problems. Frustration with the government’s inability to provide basic security led to rising public demand for leaders who would take more decisive action.
“The fact is that the judicial system, the court system, is broken in the Philippines,” said Phelim Kine, a deputy director of the Asia Division at Human Rights Watch. “When you factor in elements of corruption, and perceptions that people can buy themselves protection from the police or buy themselves out of trouble, this adds up to a lot of frustration among Filipinos who sense that government and the judicial system is part of the problem, not the solution.”
They feel unprotected from crime. That sense of threat makes them willing to support vigilante violence, which feels like the best option for restoring order.
Gema Santamaria, a professor at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology in Mexico City who studies lynchings and other forms of vigilante killings, and José Miguel Cruz, the research director at Florida International University’s Latin American and Caribbean Center, used data from across Latin America to test what leads people to support extrajudicial violence.
The data told a similar story across the countries in their sample. People who didn’t have faith in their country’s institutions