An elderly Nelson Mandela Bay woman has become a bit of an unlikely hero after a graphic video circulated on social media this week.
In the video, Anna Griffiths, 71, of the Nick Claassen municipal retirement cottages in Kariega, is seen repeatedly hitting an alleged cable thief with a heavy rubber whip while others, including a security guard, look on and even laugh.
The woman can be heard shouting in Afrikaans, telling the youngster he is a thief.
All the while, the man writhes and moans in pain in the ground.
The video has, once again, exposed just how fed up we all are with crime in SA and, perhaps, we even admire Griffiths who said she had wanted to teach the young man a lesson.
“We live in fear. We have a high fence and an electric gate but they get in.
“We cannot sleep properly at night because they are forever in here stealing, and they have knives,” she told Weekend Post’s sister publication The Herald this week.
“Maybe I did wrong but we are desperate and we don’t know what else to do.
“The police take much too long to respond when they do come, and though the security reacted fast this time, these guys just keep on coming back.”
It is a reality that crime is out of hand in SA and that, often, police do not respond quickly enough to crime as it is unfolding or that police investigations after the fact often appear to be drawn out, leaving those affected frustrated and feeling despondent.
So Griffiths’s reaction — and that of many others like her who have taken the law into their own hands — is understandable.
But it is, ultimately, vigilantism, and vigilantism is unacceptable.
As always, there is the danger that the person being punished has been wrongly accused.
While we do not condone acts of criminality either, in this matter it appears the alleged thief had been released as there was no evidence he had actually committed a crime, with police spokesperson Colonel Priscilla Naidu saying the police had no knowledge of the incident.
There is often, also, the danger of vigilantism spiralling out of control: fuelled by one person’s frustration, an entire group might have jumped on the bandwagon and the situation could very quickly and easily have escalated, with more serious consequences.
So while our immediate reaction is to applaud Griffiths, we need to take a step back and think about whether we really want our country to descend into an even further state of lawlessness, with members of society going about meting out justice.
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