Signal Crimes and ‘Virtual Victimhood’ Drawing on the semiotic theories of Umberto Eco, Martin Innes (2004a; 2004b) adopts the term ‘signal

Signal Crimes and ‘Virtual Victimhood’ Drawing on the semiotic theories of Umberto Eco, Martin Innes (2004a; 2004b) adopts the term ‘signal

crime’ to explain how widely publicised incidents of crime, regardless of their severity, might generate behavioural change by media consumers and the broader public as part of a larger process associated with the depiction of crime as news. For Innes (2004a), the signals leading to community-based behavioural changes are driven by police and media organisations working in conjunction to publicise crime’ to explain how widely publicised incidents of crime, regardless of their severity, might generate behavioural change by media consumers and the broader public as part of a larger process associated with the depiction of crime as news. For Innes (2004a), the signals leading to community-based behavioural changes are driven by police and media organisations working in conjunction to publicise

Moira Peelo (2006) has taken the concept of signal crime further by analysing over 2,800 media reports spanning a twenty-two year period dealing with thirteen ‘mega cases’, including the Dunblane Primary School shootings, the Yorkshire Ripper case, the Tottenham riots, and the murders of James Bulger and Jill Dando. Peelo illustrates how press depictions of the victim supplement descriptions of the brutality of the crime to produce parallel signals associated with criminogenic risk. For Peelo, standardised media narratives produce a sense of ‘virtual victimhood’ amongst readers, who become mediated witnesses of the incident through stylised content that triggers personalised feelings of risk. This is done through narrative techniques that objectify and depersonalise the experiences of both the offender and the victim. In short, these messages warn the everyday reader that the risk of violent criminal victimisation at the hands of a brutal, predatory, evil or randomly motivated ‘other’ is all pervasive or ubiquitous. Notably, media reports also dehumanise the experiences of victim(s) and their families by depersonalising their grief within a broader symbolic socio-political discourse about managing risk, fear and public exposure to predatory lethal violence.

‘Mediated witness’ brings homicide closer to personal experience through the reporting of moments and objects of familiarity which, thereby, become grotesque by a process of defamiliarisation, and this brings us closer to the chaos and disorder that we fear. For a period of time, what is safe and ‘home’ is transmuted by shock into alien, strange and hostile ‘otherness’ (Peelo 2006: 164).

When viewed in tandem, the signal crime–virtual victimhood framework provides an ideal method of analysing vigilantism as both a media construct and a natural extension of the shock, anxiety and outrage commonly experienced after a particularly brutal or violent crime. However, the association between violent crimes and a potential vigilante response is accompanied by a wealth of considerations extending beyond the risk, fear and harm equation identified by Innes and Peelo. As suggested earlier, vigilantism also connotes something about the way in which the neo-liberal state and its agents are less able to guarantee collective security in preventing crime. As such, the association between vigilantism and signal crime is as much about the fears associated with violent victimisation as it is about the current formal social control practices that seemingly allow vulnerable victims to succumb to the predatory acts of random and callous killers.

It is important to keep in mind that the primary focus here is on ‘mediated’ discourses rather than observable trends or documented incidents of vigilante activity per se. Therefore, the associations between vigilantism, signal crime and virtual victimhood in the case studies below must only be viewed in terms of their rhetorical power as examples of media reporting, rather than indicators that vigilante activities are on the increase or are a substantive criminogenic response to violent homicides.

Signal Crimes and Vigilantism in the Australian Press Thirty-nine of the 425 reports examined in this study depicted ten high profile incidents classifiable as signal crimes. Each involved suspects seemingly acting in total disregard of the harm they were causing to respectable, young or vulnerable victims. Only two incidents, the Snowtown murders in South Australia and the sentencing of gangland ‘war’ criminal Carl Williams, would conform to Peelo’s definition of a mega case. The Werribee DVD case involved a degrading act of male group violence targeting a vulnerable young woman, with references to a vigilante response being enmeshed within broader public anxieties over how young people use digital technologies to disseminate images of dangerous behaviour. One case involved an alleged A$20 million fraud by an Australian businessman who later fled to Canada and was eventually traced by a group of aggrieved investors. While there is no violence associated with this signal crime, the widespread community outrage over the scope of this investment scam bears all the Signal Crimes and Vigilantism in the Australian Press Thirty-nine of the 425 reports examined in this study depicted ten high profile incidents classifiable as signal crimes. Each involved suspects seemingly acting in total disregard of the harm they were causing to respectable, young or vulnerable victims. Only two incidents, the Snowtown murders in South Australia and the sentencing of gangland ‘war’ criminal Carl Williams, would conform to Peelo’s definition of a mega case. The Werribee DVD case involved a degrading act of male group violence targeting a vulnerable young woman, with references to a vigilante response being enmeshed within broader public anxieties over how young people use digital technologies to disseminate images of dangerous behaviour. One case involved an alleged A$20 million fraud by an Australian businessman who later fled to Canada and was eventually traced by a group of aggrieved investors. While there is no violence associated with this signal crime, the widespread community outrage over the scope of this investment scam bears all the

The remaining five cases are an extremely small proportion of the overall number of incidents covered in the total sample. Nevertheless, they indicate how discourses of vigilantism enmesh with signal crime and virtual victimisation, particularly in the immediate aftermath of each incident. There are also some discernible similarities in the level of public outrage associated with each incident, its timing, its location and its association with some pertinent antecedents depicted in each press report.

Two cases involved child homicides and highlight the connections between the innocence of the victim, public outrage over the suspect’s actions, anxieties over degenerating levels of public safety and the threat of vigilantism as a possible response. On 26 June 2006, eight-year old Sofia Rodriguez-Urrutia Shu was found by her brother ten minutes after she was dragged into a toilet cubicle at a shopping centre in the Perth suburb of Canning Vale. Sofia had been ‘sexually assaulted, beaten so badly that she suffered several broken bones, and strangled’ (Paddenburg 2006). This incident magnified public fears over the safety of children in mass public spaces. References to vigilante attacks emerged after twenty-one year old Dante Arthurs was charged with wilful murder and several windows were broken at his vacant home where he previously lived with his parents. There is nothing to suggest anyone connected with Sofia’s family was involved in this ‘vigilante’ attack.

Similarly, after a group of children playing in a pond in Ambarvale in south western Sydney discovered the badly decomposed body of two-year old toddler Dean Shillingsworth inside a tartan suitcase on 17 October 2007, considerable outrage was directed at Shillingsworth’s mother, Rachel Pfizner, who was charged with murder the following day. New South Wales police and Department of Housing staff undertook special measures to avert possible ‘revenge attacks’ at Pfizner’s home after her arrest (Lawrence & Yamine 2007). A feature report associated threats of ‘vigilante’ reprisals targeting Pfizner with a broader trend indicative of the ‘crowd hysteria’ associated with several other high-profile

Australian cases ranging from child homicides to the Cronulla riots (Cazzulino 2007). Shillingworth’s infancy and the anonymity of group reactions to this incident were considered major factors behind the community’s outrage in this case. However, serious questions later emerged over the failure of the New South Wales Department of Community Services to place Shillingworth in his grandmother’s care a week before his body was found.

Three additional cases involved less vulnerable victims, but complex racial and policing dynamics linked to the threat of vigilante reprisals. The location and timing of each incident are also significant, with the deaths of Bill Rowe and seventeen-year old Andrew Farrugia occurring in regional communities on major Christmas and New Year’s holidays. These unprovoked attacks were considered symptoms of pre-existing racial and youth problems in Geraldton (WA) and Griffith (NSW) respectively. Interestingly, in both cases, police used the threat of racially-driven vigilantism to reassert their legitimacy over the ‘proper course’ (Taylor 2007) of the investigative processes. Both Bill Rowe’s family and senior police called for calm after an online message board provided the site for expressions of widespread mainstream community outrage against the attack, containing numerous threats of violent reprisals directed at Geraldton’s Indigenous youth. The following quote highlights the standard police response to public calls for vigilante retaliation in both the Rowe and Farrugia cases.

The messages prompted police to warn that vigilante action would not be tolerated. Police Assistant Commissioner for regional WA Fred Gere said a small number of people were using Mr Rowe's death to whip up racial tension in the town. He said the families of those involved in the brawl were co-operating with police and warned vigilantes to let police do their job…. “This has nothing to do with any racial hatred or past behaviour of any people. The police in Geraldton will not tolerate any retaliation of any form, whatsoever … I am asking these minority groups that are sending these emails and SMS messages to leave the matter to be dealt with by the justice system” (Kelly 2007: 30).

Similarly, immediately after the double shooting of professional boxer Bassam Chami and Ibrahim Assaad in the Sydney suburb of Granville, the victims’ families and senior police issued simultaneous public warnings against ‘A 100-STRONG vigilante force of friends and relatives’ (O’Neill 2006) forming ‘vigilante style lynch mobs’ (Daily Telegraph 2006) to hunt down the killers. However, unlike Rowe and Farrugia, Chami’s death appears closely intertwined within a more complex template of revenge associated with organised criminal activity.

‘We want the killer to know there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. He will be tracked down and he will be killed. Apart from the cops, there is a team, a strikeforce, of 100 people hunting him down right now. … I tell you now, the killer's life is not worth living, inside or outside jail. Even if he is arrested, he will be killed as soon as he sets foot in prison’ (O’Neill 2006).

Discussion The combination of virtual victimhood and the outrage generated by these signal crimes ensures the term ‘vigilantism’ has prominence in media discourses documenting their progress. Whereas expressions of outrage and vengeance are more closely linked to the extreme vulnerability of child homicide victims, the Rowe, Farrugia and Chami cases are entwined within a more complex racial dynamic. Hil and Dawes (2000) suggest this is not uncommon in regional locations with disjointed connections between mainstream and Indigenous populations (2000). In the Chami case, vigilantism is simultaneously associated with strong Lebanese-Australian family and community ties and a more complex set of underlying associations with drugs, organised crime and the intricate outlaw cycles of feuding and revenge.

Despite these qualifications, the term ‘vigilantism’ appears to be a misnomer. As with many examples used in Johnston’s argument (1996), all bar the Chami case reveal a lack of organised community involvement. More pertinently, the noble motive of community protection to justify smashing house windows or the verbal taunting of an actual, perceived or persistent offender is absent from all signal crimes in this sample. ‘Vigilantism’ therefore appears to be a rhetorical device used by the media to describe community outrage and isolated promises of violent revenge in the immediate aftermath of each case, rather than any substantive crime prevention responses to these incidents. In line with Innes (2004a; 2004b), the vigilantism discourse is further mediated by the highly public reassurances from police, supported by the cooperative family members of each victim, warning the community that violent retaliation will simply undermine state’s capacity to ensure justice is served. The relationship between police legitimacy and threats of vigilantism appears to be more pronounced in racially charged contexts, or where it seems necessary to temper community outrage to prevent the escalation of violent retaliation in cases involving extremely vulnerable infant victims.

Clearly, the lines between vengeance, anger and ‘vigilantism’ are extremely fine and Johnston’s (1996) definition could be considered too exclusionary when applied to signal crimes involving violent homicide. It remains to be seen how other forms of environmental, sexual or mundane crime generate calls for organised ‘vigilante’ community-based harm prevention responses that are more in line with Johnston’s conceptualisation of this problematic yet important criminological issue.