The New Committee of Vigilance

Digital Vigilantes scour online clues to help the FBI and police find criminals.

The badge of the Committee of Vigilance of 1856 in San Francisco. This is where we get the word ‘vigilante’ from.

This week as I watched the images pouring in from the Capitol Riots of January 6th, I was struck by one thing. It was the desire of my fellow online citizens to help law enforcement catch people that they could plainly see were breaking the law. It reminded me a lot of the Committee of Vigilance.

In 1847 San Francisco was a sleepy village of about one thousand people. It had recently had an influx of settlers trying to get away from the government in the form of Samuel Brannan and his Mormon followers. They were part of a two prong approach to finding a new land to settle in the west — their overland counterparts formed Utah while Brannan and his lot took a boat. It stayed small until Brannan found out about gold being found at Sutter’s Mill. He proceeded to buy every shovel and pickaxe in the state (not really that hard at the time for someone with money) and then rode a horse through the middle of San Francisco yelling about the gold in a now apocryphal gold rush tale.

Men poured into town, and within a year the thousand people had swollen to 20,000. Within another year it was at 50,000. Not all the men coming to San Francisco were there for the gold. Some were there for the gambling. Some were there to make money off the miners. And some were there to steal.