Knight riders to the rescue: Vietnam vigilantes bust crooks

HO CHI MINH CITY: Vietnam’s “street knights”, hurtling through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, are not your typical medieval warriors. Their stallions are scooters. They wear rubber flip-flops, not metal boots. And their shining armor is a tracksuit jacket billowing like a cape. The band of bike-riding unpaid vigilantes chases down petty criminals in Vietnam’s largest city and the neighboring province of Binh Duong, where residents grumble about rising crime and ineffectual policing.

“Whenever there’s a call I show up,” said one of them, Nguyen Thanh Hai, who gets 50 to 100 calls for help every day about robberies, drugs, and even kidnappings. “Even at midnight, when I can barely keep my eyes open.” Hai, 47, keeps a notebook recording details of the roughly 4,000 criminals he has helped catch and turn over to police during 21 years as a part-time crime fighter, though he gets no monetary reward. “You don’t think about money when you do this,” he added.

He is among a group of about 30 men in Ho Chi Minh City, and 1,500 in the province, who have modified their bikes with police-like sirens and upgraded engines that can reach speeds of more than 170 kph. Videos of their high-speed chases have gone viral on social media. One shows thieves weaving between trucks and cars along a twisting, suburban highway, with the group in hot pursuit. “My little son gets so excited when he sees me on YouTube,” said Pham Tan Thanh, a 31-year-old Binh Duong taxi driver who becomes a street knight in his spare time. “He always asks me when I’m going to go out again.”

The men don’t see themselves as heroes, they said, but they do appreciate the occasional gesture of thanks, with Southeast Asia’s famously pungent-smelling durian fruit being a favorite.

Crime is low in Communist-ruled Vietnam, but petty theft and similar minor crimes are a growing problem in urban areas like Ho Chi Minh City, home to 8.6 million people. Last year, the former Saigon ranked as the third least-safe city worldwide, after Caracas and Karachi, on the Safe Cities Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit, which rates personal security in 60 cities. Some crime victims, hoping for a faster response, turn to the vigilantes before the police.