Vigilantism Rises When Forces of Law and Order Fall : The recent shooting death of a tagger is an ominous sign pointing to the deteriorating ability of government to protect the citizenry.

When Gertrude Stein observed that nature imitates art, she said a mouthful. The ongoing brouhaha over a Sun Valley resident’s violent midnight encounter with “taggers” doing their dirty work is the third time in recent years that real world headlines have reflected a disquieting similarity to events depicted in the motion picture “Death Wish.”

First, it was New York’s Bernhard Goetz who fended off an attempted robbery on a New York subway by shooting the would-be robbers. Then, Ellie Nessler, up in the Gold Rush country, dispatched a repeat offender charged with sexually molesting her 6-year-old son after he smirked at her as he sat in the courtroom awaiting trial. Now, it’s William Masters II, out for a midnight stroll, confronting and ultimately shooting two vandals defacing his Sun Valley neighborhood.

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Underlying the heated public debate that these events have precipitated is a troublesome dilemma.

On the one hand, we cannot let people, even legitimately outraged people, run around shooting the bad guys. If nothing else, the vigilantes are no Canadian Mounties, and they often get the wrong man. Getting mistakenly plugged by an outraged crime victim can be hazardous to one’s health, to say nothing of the health of a good society.

On the other hand, what is one to say to folks who quite rightly point to the fact that--at least in some parts of town--they have been abandoned by the forces of law and order and have become virtual prisoners in their homes, unable to walk the public streets without risking violence at the hands of criminals? Our tradition prizes people’s right to go freely about their business, and trifling with that freedom understandably evokes a strong reaction.

Historically, we did not have to face this dilemma because of police intervention. I am old enough to remember when saying “Cut that out, or I’ll call the cops on you,” was a meaningful threat that inhibited most antisocial activity. No more.

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Today, such a threat is meaningless at best, and likely to provoke taunts and violence at worst. Today’s harried police officers are simply unable to interdict the wholesale violation of a host of misdemeanor laws that forbid everything from littering to vandalism and thus are supposed to hold together the fabric of our daily lives. Moreover, the old loitering and vagrancy laws that gave the police an edge in confronting would-be criminals are largely gone, declared unconstitutional by the courts.

And don’t forget the legacy of the 1960s that gave us a coarsening of public discourse and behavior, and invented a whole lexicon of real or fancied grievances used as excuses for violent lawlessness. Some of these justifications for criminal behavior are hardly new; the “underprivileged children” explanation was rightly ridiculed in song as far back as the 1950s musical “West Side Story.”

More recently, the destructive doctrine has emerged that interdicting criminal behavior by drug-besotted inner-city young men is inevitably tainted by racism and police brutality.

Nowhere has this social erosion been more evident than in the case of graffiti. Something about that form of vandalism strikes a deep cord of resentment, which is perhaps why the vandals persist in their behavior. Graffiti are a quintessential form of malice. The perpetrators gain nothing except perhaps the perverse satisfaction of having placed their brand on others. It’s rather like a dog sprinkling neighborhood hydrants to mark his turf. But by thus imposing their brand of territoriality on their victims, the taggers inspire powerful reactions that are also motivated by the victims’ own sense of territoriality.

The intense reaction to the perceived invasion of one’s home turf, I suspect, reaches rage proportions when foolish individuals exhort graffiti as “art,” glorify the perpetrators as “artists” and proclaim the blighted lives and splattered homes of the taggers’ victims as a “canvas.”

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Thus, graffiti set into motion disproportionately powerful social forces. Particularly when graffiti become ubiquitous, as they are in many neighborhoods, they become more than just defacement. They become a menacing manifestation of the taggers’ (read gangsters’) power. We can do it to your homes, your workplaces and to your neighborhood, goes the message, and we can do it to you. And the cops can’t stop us.

This is fertile soil for vigilantism. That is why Masters, who took a young man’s life, is widely regarded as a hero. And there lies the message that we ignore at our peril. Vigilantism in California died out a long time ago when people came to believe that they would be protected by the forces of law and order. When that faith is no longer justified, and the police can no longer protect us, we should not act surprised if the vigilante tradition rears its head.

John Marshall, the great chief justice, wrote almost 200 years ago that the first duty of government is to protect the citizenry. That was true then, and it is true now. A society that does not appreciate that fails in its principal duty to its citizens, and the citizens who acquiesce in such a state of affairs deserve whatever history chooses to dish out.