At least on the West Coast of the U.S. it seems to me like there’s been a big change over the past ten years or so in what kinds of security events could happen in a given public space. These days it feels like anything is possible. We’ve had homeless people tailgate employees into the office building where I work. One tried to move into the handicapped bathroom stall. Another started grabbing things from people’s desks in an unoccupied area. After Portland began allowing overnight camping on public property under the Safe Sleep program, a small patch of land across from our office became a campsite pretty quickly, as did the sidewalks on adjacent streets. Some of the people who were camping there were pretty unstable, so you never really knew what to expect.

In that same period of time, also on the West Coast, we’ve seen a shift towards a more lenient model of policing and prosecuting. The idea is to not laden people who are already struggling with homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, or all three with legal problems that arise from those situations. It’s a laudable effort, and a noble goal, but it has meant that people who get arrested for something like auto theft or burglary are quickly released. Sometimes you’ll read in the news about a person who’s been arrested for a serious crime like murder, and the article will mention dozens and dozens of other arrests for things like burglary, assault or theft. The police know this, so they often don’t bother following up on property crimes.

That system as a whole can really make the major West Coast cities feel pretty lawless sometimes, but people don’t really like to talk about it in social settings because it’s hard to talk about problems like that without being misconstrued as a reactionary conservative. But if you get them taking one on one, and they feel like they can trust you, the frustrations come pouring out. So I’m not that surprised that there’s a company trying to capitalize on that sentiment, horrifying as it is. I’ve been feeling for a while now that given the current trajectory of things, a vigilante backlash was likely to become inevitable.