“I had to beat the hell out of the nursing-home director” and "Do what you have to do... We’ll deal with the consequences later" sound like vigilantism to me
Cowardice is not a civic duty, nor a virtue. Use of force by civilians in perceived service of the law is often justified. Going out looking for a fight is one thing, serving the public is another.
Ideally, the law can be upheld without force; when force is required to uphold the law, we could ideally rely on peace officers to be ready, willing, and able to take on that burden; but in the end, it is the responsibility of society as a whole to uphold the law and prevent suffering.
When force is necessary, and when peace officers aren't around, a person who uses the necessary degree of force to rescue old people from a drone who would rather watch them wade naked in their own faeces until they go hypothermic or fall ill, than violate a workplace policy is not a vigilante, but an upstanding citizen.
It's natural to scrutinize and question the motivations of somebody who has used force, but it is a disservice to us all to hold common people to a higher standard of conduct than the police.
The misspelling of a word does not destroy the sentence structure.
The legal questions which are a lot more interesting around this kind of rescue operation are property damage, unintentional harms, incompetence, liability, etc. (like, if volunteers direct people to a shelter which is itself unsafe, or if people get harmed during rescues. Government agents have a lot of immunity there, relative to private citizens.)
Apparently the cops thought it was immediate enough, since they showed up shortly afterwards and sided with the "vigilante."
But if your residents are "knee deep in sewage" that's pretty gross.
But when the police showed up shortly afterwards, it was the nursing home director they detained.
When the police arrived they sided with the guy trying to get the people out of the poop.
The nursing-home director was preventing people from reaching aid. He was just a robot following orders, and in extreme circumstances sometimes you gotta break machines to save people.
Ass-beatings are not often justified, but when they are, boy they are.