Police "standing back" & what looks like "vigilantism" are often evidence of of pretty grim but careful political calculations that should be called out for what they are. This behavior looks like evidence of one or several potential explicitly political strategies. 1/n https://twitter.com/Cirincione/status/1298652877976723458

1.) Outsourcing. There's a whole literature in comparative politics focused on whether/when governments outsource violence to militias, e.g., for plausible deniability, or because professional soldiers won't do it. See here, for example. 2/n https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/jcr/59/5 

2.) Partisan reinforcement. Research on ethnic riots in India (the prime example being Wilkinson's work) shows local variation in when police intervene v. when they allow violent escalation. This is a political strategy deployed for electoral ends. 3/n https://www.google.com/books/edition/Votes_and_Violence/tLpRFbLSxvAC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=steven+wilkinson&printsec=frontcover

3.) Blackmail. For example, during the 2011 Egyptian uprising, police left the streets hoping chaos would ensue and people would beg them to return. Some neighborhoods consequently created popular committees to replace the police (see Ismail's work). 4/n

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9427215.pdf

These aren't necessarily 1:1 comparisons. But, a lot of powerful research from different settings tells us something more than vigilantism is happening, that there are likely patterns to identify, and we'd be advised to try to see these behaviors for what they are. 5/5