The rise of the village vigilante

Living off the beaten track was idyllic until one night last November. At 1 a.m. during a particularly heavy downpour, a group of hooded men came onto our property and tried to burgle us. Lulled into a false sense of security after three months in our rural home, we’d casually left our 25-year-old Land Rover Defender next to our barn, rather than locked away inside as it would normally have been. 

The thieves had come prepared. Two of them scaled the fence and disabled our electric gates, ready for a quick getaway. Another one waited in the lane, engine running. The men opened the Defender’s door but were stopped in their thieving tracks by a metal security box that sits locked over the pedals. Luckily for us, they hadn’t quite brought all the right tools for the job.

Our newly installed Ring doorbell caught all of this on camera. Weirdly it didn’t actually ring an alert, nor did our dog bark. We all slept soundly, discovering the next morning the electric gates swinging gently in the breeze, the opening mechanism sawn clean through. It was weird and unsettling knowing that we’d had intruders, the only small comfort being that they hadn’t got away with their intended prize. But my overwhelming feeling was one of dread that they might come back the following night to finish off the job.

Kent Police, to their credit, responded quickly to my online report of the incident and requested our camera footage. But that’s all that happened. I wasn’t surprised. Policing of rural crimes is famously ineffective, so it’s no wonder that country folk sometimes take matters into their own hands.

You have to be of a certain age for the name of Tony Martin to resonate. He was a Norfolk farmer at the end of his tether after numerous break-ins and a lack of action by the police. One night, Mr Martin lay in wait for the thieves, cradling his shotgun. He ended up in prison for shooting dead a teenage burglar, but the case prompted an outpouring of anger from a public fed up with property owners being punished rather than the thieves. People spoke out saying that they, like Tony Martin, would have defended themselves if the police were unable to help them.

This was back in 1999, a more innocent time and crucially before everyone had a smartphone in their pocket. The Blair government pledged to inject more cash into rural policing, but 25 years on and now a victim myself, I’m wondering if anything has really changed?

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In 2023, the New Forest villages of Lyndhurst and Minstead held the dubious honour of having the most unsolved burglaries in the entire country – not a single crime had been solved for three years. Residents posted incidents on WhatsApp instead of bothering to call 999, relying on each other for clues and evidence to try and catch the perpetrators, a kind of Neighbourhood Watch for the instant messenger age.

At our local pub a few weeks after our attempted Land Rover theft incident, we were invited to join one of these local and longstanding WhatsApp groups. ‘It’s really effective’ said the burly chap leaning on the bar holding his tankard, ‘as soon as you get any more trouble, just stick it on the WhatsApp and I promise you, three or four pick-ups with a couple of big blokes will do their best to be at your gates as quick as they can, day or night’. 

I asked if that might not antagonise the situation if thieves were tooled up and intent on getting away with my property? ‘Nah’, he said confidently. ‘They get scared off easy enough when we turn up, it’s not worth the hassle for them – they’ll go elsewhere’. He said there was no point involving the police; much easier to use small village networks to report suspicious incidents and warn others that troublemakers might be in the area. That in itself, he said, acted as a deterrent to the criminals.

But what if they don’t get ‘scared off easy’ when the pick-up men arrive? What if the crims refuse to leave and want a fight? What if one of them gets fatally injured on my property? What if I get banged up like Tony Martin?

Government statistics show that rural crimes are much lower than those in urban areas, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. In a town you are surrounded by people, on foot, in cars, living next door, above or below – out in the sticks it’s a very different vibe. We do have neighbours – one sort of next door and another about half a mile away across an orchard. But I’m aware that if I were home alone and had sudden cause to scream, nobody would hear it. Hopefully, if I could get to my phone and alert my neighbours through WhatsApp, they would come to the rescue.