Civilian Enforcers

Authors

Karen Pita Loor, Boston University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Summer 2025

ISSN

0899-8086

Publisher

Temple University School of Law

Language

en-US

Abstract

This Article analyzes the largely unexplored phenomenon of militant civilians engaged in efforts to police and silence activism that challenges entrenched American power systems and economic distributions placing whites atop the social hierarchy in the United States. I argue that this civilian enforcement is an unregulated vessel for state-sponsored violence meant to silence the contestation of the existing racial hierarchy. While scholars, myself included, have written about the many ways police confront and silence racial justice activists on the streets at least since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, the role law enforcement plays in silencing racial justice movements is only part a larger state-sponsored effort to preserve existing racial hierarchies. Supplementing violent policing from law enforcement actors, militant right-wing civilians descend on public streets ready to battle BLM activists. These mostly white, often armed, civilians are force multipliers of state efforts to suppress BLM voices, whose demands for a reevaluation of established distributions of power and wealth ignite fear and resentment among certain whites. Yet, vigilantes’ efforts evade constitutional examination because of their nature as non-state actors. However, police routinely tolerate or even collaborate with these civilian vigilantes, while simultaneously focusing violent enforcement efforts on BLM protesters. I argue that this pattern of disparate police enforcement, where racial justice activists are violently policed while civilian enforcers evade punishment, effectively transforms civilian vigilantes into unregulated state-sponsored violence workers. This is reminiscent of the antebellum South, where the state delegated legal authority to all whites to forcibly enforce laws that suppressed Black expression and any sentiment that endorsed Black liberation, thus showing that the suppression of Black liberation ideologies by state-sponsored civilian enforcers persists even today

Recommended Citation

Karen Pita Loor, Civilian Enforcers , 97 Temple Law Review 507 (2025).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/4112