I though I was on the side of waiting for more details before jumping in on one side or the other, but apparently I'm not. On the one hand, the police in Seattle are getting kind of notorious for arresting the wrong people (and misjudgin appropriate force levels in the process). On the other hand, all I've seen on the local (Seattle) news are stories that Jones pepper sprayed a group of people who had recently left a club, with varying additional details including:
1) He has video evidence that he was breaking up a fight
2) He used the pepper spray on someone else only after being attacked himself
3) The people he says were fighting were actually dancing
Then there's the whole vigilanteism angle. I'm generally anti-vigilante. Even if I don't always think individual members of the police force are the most upstanding people in the world, at least they have legal authority to be using non-lethal force to break up a fight. Nobody granted any authority to Jones or to any other random "super heroes" who want to police the streets, and while most of the stories about things he's done are good (stopped a stolen bus, broken up several fights, etc.), all it takes is for him to misunderstand one situation and jump in on the side of the wrong person and he goes from superhero to dumbass. Now, if he wanted to wander the streets and call the police when he saw problems that needed to be dealt with, more power to him. Any citizen has that right (or, if you're so inclined, that responsibility). But when you bring force to bear on a situation, unless you're dead certain that you're following the local citizen's arrest codes, you've crossed the line. Vigilanteism can be extremely dangerous.
Just a few years back there was a guy, who admittedly was a registered sex offender, who was beaten nearly to death (or worse, the details are a bit fuzzy) by several people when a girl in his neighborhood reported that someone (not the guy they attacked, she hadn't yet made an ID) attempted to rape her. Turned out to be a completely different suspect and now the girl's family is being prosecuted on aggravated assault charges, like she needs to add that to the list of problems she has after someone attempted to rape her. Plus, if I remember correctly, the only reason the guy was even on the sex offender list was because he had "consensual" sex with his then 16 year old girlfriend when he was 21 (statutory rape - it can get tricky when it comes to consent, the age of consent, and the age of the older participant).
He'd done his time, been to his therapy, registered as required, and was - by all accounts - living a good, clean life. He had just run afoul of a mother who hated him enough to turn him in for statutory rape of her daughter, and now he's been beaten to within an inch of his life (I believe he was in a coma for a while and suffered some pretty severe brain damage). So now we have two victims, the girl who some scumbag tried to rape, and the guy who has to relearn how to walk and talk because he did something stupid several years before and was in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time.
No, sir. I do not like vigilanteism. Has way too much potential for getting the wrong people in trouble or worse. You see a problem situation, call the cops, let them handle it. You want to help the situation, stay on the scene and file a statement detailing what you saw/heard. Our courts aren't perfect, but at least in the legal system you get a jury of your peers and a chance at an appeal - what do you get with some joker in a costume or a gang of pissed off parents?
