Hue and Cry to Hi-Vis
Britain’s Return to Vigilante Policing
The rise of volunteer patrols in Bournemouth, Belfast and beyond isn’t grassroots community spirit; it’s the latest chapter in a long history of state retreat, public fear, and racialised street politics.
The Present Danger
Bournemouth’s “Safeguard Force” swagger in stab vests, radios crackling, bodycams blinking red. In Belfast, men prowl and harass migrants under the banner of so-called “safety patrols.” In Sunderland, protesters outside migrant accommodation turn into self-styled guardians of the night. In Rotherham and towns scarred by child exploitation scandals, far-right agitators try to wrap themselves in the costume of community protection. Across coastal and northern towns, patrols sprout like weeds in the cracks of a failing system. What looks at first like a novel reaction to disorder is in fact a grim encore of an old routine: when government strips back neighbourhood policing, people don’t feel freer, they feel exposed. Into the vacuum march unregulated groups, half theatre, half threat, sharpening social boundaries while acting out a borrowed authority. The scene is lurid, unsettling, and profoundly telling.
This is an abject failure of government, policy, and policing.
Official data hardly justifies the panic, but panic has a life of its own. Bournemouth’s crime rate in 2025 stood at 66 per 1,000 people, above Dorset’s average, yet still 7% lower than the national figure. Headlines scream of violence, 31% of all recorded incidents, and weapon possession is climbing by +11.5% in a single year. The tabloids turn every knife into an omen, while the ONS calmly reports knife crime stabilising at around 50,500 sharp-instrument offences annually, and robbery falling by 3% in 2025. The data whispers moderation; the discourse howls chaos.
The scandal is not the raw numbers but the empty follow-through. Charge rates for burglary and theft remain stubbornly low, leaving victims abandoned. PCSOs have been slashed to 7,539 full-time equivalents, and special constables dwindled 10.6% in 2024 alone. Trust in police hovers around 40%, collapsing further with every scandal. For the public, the uniform has lost its magic. The stage is set, the soil tilled, and into that fertile ground sprout groups like Safeguard Force, loud, visible, and dangerous in their theatre of authority.
Who does the Patrolling?
Volunteer patrols are not new, though their shapes and motives vary wildly. Street Pastors, launched in 2003, now deploy over 12,000 volunteers in more than 300 towns, offering blankets, flip-flops, first aid and a listening ear on Saturday nights. They are often credited with reducing late-night injuries and diffusing conflict in nightlife districts by providing visible care. Shomrim in London’s Jewish communities grew from the Hasidic neighbourhood watch model, providing rapid evidence to police and immediate reassurance to residents facing anti-Semitic threats. Their patrol cars and radios create a sense of security, but also highlight how minority communities sometimes build parallel safety structures when trust in mainstream policing falters. Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), meanwhile, fund uniformed rangers to patrol commercial centres, an extension of private capital into public order, raising questions about two-tier safety where well-funded districts get security while poorer areas go without. Originally championed as localist Hail Marys to rescue struggling high streets, BIDs have morphed into something more unsettling. They now bankroll uniformed rangers and contract private firms, effectively outsourcing slices of policing and public order. In practice, this means that well-funded districts enjoy visible patrols and surveillance while poorer areas are left without, deepening inequalities. What began as a mechanism to revive commerce has become a creeping transfer of security responsibilities from the state to private boards. This development demands closer scrutiny in its own right.
These benign or pragmatic models contrast sharply with newer ideological patrols. In 2013, self-styled “Muslim Patrols” in East London harassed drinkers and women in short skirts; their members were jailed for intimidation and public order offences, a stark reminder of how quickly moral policing collapses into abuse. Britain First, in the mid-2010s, staged “Christian patrols” outside mosques, an intimidation tactic that blurred activism and vigilantism. During the summer 2024 riots, sparked by false claims about an asylum seeker, over 1,280 arrests were made. Many defendants came not from the towns where the violence broke out but from deprived areas far removed, pulled in by online rage and misinformation. Vigilante activity here was not protective; it was performative, racialised, and political, stoking division while masquerading as community defence. Organisers were not naive; they used the language of safety to mask an intent to sow discord, mobilising outrage against migrants and minorities, amplifying fear through online networks, and deliberately feeding grievance politics to fracture communities further.
The Long Shadow of History
Britain has been here before, and every time the consequences ripple outward.
1285 – The Statute of Winchester made every able-bodied man responsible for the “hue and cry,” fining whole parishes if they failed to stop crime. The order was collective, the punishment indiscriminate.
1640s – Civil War Trained Bands patrolled towns, enforcing not only order but loyalty and religion. Patrols became political weapons, deepening division.
1749 – Bow Street Runners, privately funded detectives, blurred lines between justice and profit, laying foundations for corruptible, partisan policing.
1888 – Whitechapel Vigilance Committee filled a vacuum during the Ripper murders but weaponised fear of Jewish migrants, planting seeds of hostility that outlived the crimes.
1930s – British Union of Fascists paraded in uniform, claiming to “keep order” while terrorising minorities, leading to the Public Order Act 1936. Here, street patrols fed directly into authoritarian politics.
1990s – Balsall Heath (Birmingham) residents patrolled against prostitution, initially effective, but ultimately displacing problems and sparking debates about vigilantism’s dangers.
The loop is always the same: state retreat → volunteer patrol → mission creep → intimidation → state crackdown. But these are not isolated accidents of history—they reflect systemic shifts in government itself. Each era of austerity, deregulation, or populist retrenchment has opened space for civilians to claim authority once reserved for the state. The consequences are cumulative: mistrust deepens, divisions widen, and society fractures further with every cycle of neglect followed by overreaction.
Why is this Moment Different?
The difference in 2025 is scale and amplification. Social media allows a small group to recruit, fundraise and broadcast nationally in days. Sympathetic outlets give them platforms, painting them as “the answer.” Political actors, especially on the far right, are openly encouraging replication. But it is not just fringe voices. Well-suited MPs, columnists in major broadsheets, talk radio hosts, and independent journalists with vast online followings all fan the flames. An algorithm amplifies the message: clips go viral, hashtags trend, and the line between reportage and incitement blurs. What begins with local organisers quickly escalates into national discourse, with suits and soundbites giving vigilante patrols an aura of legitimacy they should never have.
And beneath the noise sits disproportionality. Black people in England and Wales are five times more likely to be arrested and over nine times more likely to be stopped and searched than White people. In Dorset, Black residents are 8.1 times more likely to be arrested. Minority communities already feel over-policed and under-protected. Volunteer patrols, especially in overwhelmingly White towns, are primed to harden that antagonism.
How Government and Police are Failing
This is not about citizens “stepping up.” It is about the state stepping back.
Neighbourhood policing gutted: PCSOs and specials cut, stations closed, visibility evaporated.
Accountability dodged: underused Community Safety Accreditation Schemes (CSAS) could have formalised vetted, limited civilian roles, but languished.
Public Order safeguards ignored: the very lessons of the 1930s—that uniforms + ideology = intimidation are being tested again.
Funding misdirected: instead of restoring police capacity, successive governments channelled grants and community funds into short-term patrol schemes, BID ranger programmes, and security contracts. Public money that could have financed proper, accountable policing has instead underwritten a patchwork of quasi-policing experiments, normalising outsourcing while weakening the very service citizens rely on.
Instead of ring-fencing neighbourhood policing, the government has allowed the space to be colonised by crowdfunding, cosplay, and even its own misallocated budgets.
From the hue and cry of 1285 to Mosley’s blackshirts in 1936, Britain has oscillated between communal self-policing and centralised authority. Each retreat of the state gave birth to private enforcers. Each resurgence of private patrols ended in scandal, intimidation, or violence. The lesson is stark: if the government will not visibly police the everyday, the everyday will be policed by others. And each moment of retreat has coincided with systemic changes in government, from the austerity politics of the 20th and 21st centuries, to Victorian laissez‑faire approaches, to interwar crises where the state stepped back and extremists stepped forward. These cycles show not just community response but government complicity: by cutting, outsourcing, or ignoring, administrations of every era have paved the road for private actors to claim authority.
Bournemouth’s Safeguard Force is not a curiosity. It is the canary in the coalmine, signalling what happens when governance retreats and spectacle replaces service.