Arrester in United States

Arrester Definition

In Scotch law. One who sues out and obtains an arrestment of his debtor’s goods or movable obligations. (1).

Right of citizens to make arrests

American law, however, has long allowed a form of vigilance that is closer to vigilantism than you might think. In every state in the union, a private citizen has the right to arrest, and in some cases physically restrain, a person he has reason to believe has committed a felony. The District of Columbia and states such as Virginia and Louisiana limit citizen’s arrests to felony-level crimes only, but other states, such as California, permit a private person to make an arrest for a misdemeanor, so long as it’s been committed in his presence. As a result, the number of citizen’s arrests differs wildly from state to state and even from city to city. The Washington, D.C., police reported no citizen’s arrests over the year 2003; the LAPD reported 6,441—all for misdemeanor offenses.

THE IDEA THAT CITIZENS ARE RESPONSIBLE for policing their communities dates back to before the Norman Conquest of 1066, when the sheriff, or “Shire Reeve,” could call on any free male subject to serve on a posse. Free male subjects were expected to constrain felons and in some cases to administer justice. Once a representative of the king declared someone to be an “out-law,” anyone could kill or capture that person without further intercession from the authorities.

Police forces are actually a relatively recent development: Up through early 19th-century America, the only forces were private ones hired by the wealthy to protect their interests. In the tradition of British common law, it was considered a citizen’s duty to step in and make an arrest when he witnessed a crime. Magistrates and sheriffs were employed to help citizens process criminals; it was not the job of the former to catch the latter.

Even after the birth of urban American police forces in the 1840s, cops primarily handled misdemeanor-level crimes such as public drunkenness and gambling. Dealing with felonies, including rape, murder, and assault, often fell to the citizens who witnessed them. This was the case particularly in smaller towns and in the West, which was slower to develop police forces.

According to Roger Lane, a historian at Haverford College and author of Violent Death in the City: Suicide, Accident, and Murder in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia, the majority of murderers in late 19th-century Philadelphia were arrested not by cops but by citizens. “There were relatively few patrolmen, no radios, no phones: It wasn’t easy to call a cop,” he said.

Near the end of the late 19th century, as cities became larger and more anonymous, people became hesitant to intervene in the affairs of unfamiliar neighbors. As a result, citizens began to depend more on police forces. Over the course of the 20th century, the powers of the police expanded and cops gained legal protection against liability, which ordinary citizens didn’t have. As police forces became more institutionalized, they claimed an exclusive capacity to deal with crime.

These days, the police view citizens who confront criminals not as fellow enforcers of the law but as meddlers—and as potential victims. One justification they give for discouraging citizen crime fighters is the danger (apparently ignored when 19th-century Philadelphians were intrepidly nabbing murderers) that untrained citizens could get hurt in the process. This was one of the concerns that the Phillipsburg police voiced about Wyant’s actions. As Officer Carmody explained, “What if you go up to a person whose dog is defecating and that person is high on cocaine or heroin, and they beat you?”

Worst-case scenarios aside, police today are also wary of one-man crime fighting units like Wyant because they represent “amateur night,” in the words of Michael Buerger, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University and a former police officer. It’s not uncommon for people who make citizen’s arrests—some of whom seem to have only reruns of Cops to draw upon for their knowledge of due process—to get in trouble for making false or otherwise improper arrests. (…)

Citizens making arrests don’t just risk breaking the law; they risk offending propriety. Only a small percentage of cases seem to fit the popular idea of citizen’s arrest, in which a sober, upstanding Clark Kent witnesses an illegal act and changes into a heroic enforcer. More often, it seems, the arresting citizens are either humorless do-gooders or overzealous wannabes. “When a citizen intervenes on low-level stuff, you want to ask, ‘For god’s sake, who are you?’,” said Buerger.

Since just about anyone can make a citizen’s arrest, many situations quickly devolve into free-for-alls. According to Jason Lee, a public information officer at the LAPD, the parties involved in a citizen’s arrest frequently wind up trying to arrest each other.

In November 2002, an angry motorist in Sacramento tried to make a citizen’s arrest of Jason Meggs, who was demonstrating to promote the rights of cyclists, as a member of an organization called Critical Mass. Meggs and his cohorts, in turn, retaliated by trying to arrest the motorist. Meggs, who has tried and failed to make three citizen’s arrests during similar protests, said they often turn into a he-said, she-said. “The police want things like that to go away,” he noted.

AS MUCH AS COPS CONSIDER the citizen’s arrest a nuisance, though, they concede there are situations when they hope that citizens will step in. In the mid-1980s, the police began to encourage citizens to monitor their neighborhoods through community policing programs. In some violent urban areas, citizens took a more active role in crime fighting, participating in neighborhood patrols and even picketing drug houses and confronting dealers.

But the events that seem to have most changed the public’s perception of its role were the attacks of September 11. In May 2003, Don Belew was working at Steve’s Auto Sales in Norfolk, Va., when he witnessed a drunk driver slam into another car, killing a teenage boy. When the driver fled the scene, Belew and another man chased him down and made a citizen’s arrest. Belew claimed to have been inspired by the example of Todd Beamer, one of the passengers who rushed the cockpit of hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.

Attorney General John Ashcroft made vigilance a policy when he urged citizens to report suspicious activity through “a National Neighborhood Watch Program,” spurring the formation of dozens of new local watch groups. The Department of Homeland Security has made repeated pleas to citizens to help fight terrorism, pushing the pendulum back toward the era of citizen involvement. Secretary Tom Ridge created a Citizen Corps Program, which will convene local councils to inform citizens about their role in homeland security and crime prevention. “It is essential to communities across the country to involve all citizens at the state and local level in our national preparedness and prevention efforts,” he said.

BUT BRINGING CITIZENS BACK into the crime fighting equation poses new risks in 21st-century America. In its spoof of Ridge’s department, the parody website whitehouse.org warns “aspiring citizen informants” to contact the FBI if they notice “brown-skinned persons conversing in heated gibberish.”

The joke highlights the concern that civil rights lawyers and activists have about the re-emergence of the citizen crime fighter in our post-9/11 age. America is a lot more diverse than it was when English common law dictated that citizens police the streets. Ethnic and racial tensions heighten the dangers of vigilantism. “In a polyglot society like ours, citizen’s arrest could be a real nightmare if citizens go around imposing their own standards,” said Roger Lane.

Worry over racial bias extends to private police forces, which lack formal arrest powers and often rely on the citizen’s arrest. Citizens and corporations continue to be disenchanted with the services provided by public police departments. The result, according to David Sklansky, a professor of criminal law at the UCLA School of Law, is that over the last three decades, the number of private police forces has increased significantly. By 1999 there were roughly three private guards for every two sworn-in officers in the country. Private police are now patrolling everything from the grounds of corporations like Microsoft to theme parks to gated communities. Even the New York Stock Exchange employs private security police who man blockades protecting the exchange and inspect vehicles in its vicinity.

Private police forces, though, lack the regulatory oversight that has helped expose problems like racial profiling among traditional police forces. Their ascendance represents a return to the way of doing business in the 19th century, when catching criminals was a private affair entrusted to citizens, or to forces hired by the wealthy. “The rise of private security is a throwback to the old days of constables and night watches,” Sklansky explained.

Yet there are plenty of communities where policing is still public work and where individual citizens consider it their duty to intervene when someone breaks the law. No one wants a nation of tattletales, but even the police admit that there are situations when citizen law enforcers help protect the community.

By Katherine Marsh

Notice

This definition of Arrester is based on The Cyclopedic Law Dictionary.