When the State Falters

The Prospects for Criminal Governance in the Anglosphere

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Nothing in this article amounts to an endorsement of criminal activity of any kind.

We began this series by saying that nature abhors a vacuum. A sort of conservation law operates on authority, just as it does in thermodynamics—when official authority fails, unofficial authority takes its place. In the first two articles of this series, we provided detailed case studies of modern organized crime syndicates which provide state-level services, but unofficially—at times with, and at times without the tacit sanction of the state. In all cases, these case studies were focused on organizations with roots outside of the English-speaking world.

But today, material conditions similar to those that birthed these para-sovereigns are reappearing in contemporary English-speaking countries, raising the spectre that folkish, tribal, and criminal networks could take on quasi-governing roles. This final article will examine real-life symptoms of governance failure in these societies, from policing vacuums and unaddressed street crime to parallel justice systems and municipal breakdown.

The United States

In the United States, a wave of police departures and rising violent crime has left many communities increasingly unpoliced—conditions that echo the power vacuums in which mafias historically thrived. National surveys have recorded a 45% spike in police retirements and an 18% jump in resignations in 2020–2021.¹ Struggling to recruit replacements amid low morale and public scrutiny, departments from Philadelphia to Seattle now operate with hundreds fewer officers than just a few years ago. The result is slower responses, and importantly, selective law enforcement. In 2021, the US murder rate jumped 30%, the biggest one-year rise since record-keeping began.² Philadelphia hit an all-time high in homicides that year, and Portland’s homicide rate exploded by over 200% since 2019.³ Police simply cannot answer every call. “We’re getting more calls for service and there are fewer people to answer them,” admitted a Philadelphia police spokesperson in 2022.⁴

Departments have been forced to triage—Los Angeles shuttered specialized units (human trafficking, narcotics, gun details) and slashed its homelessness outreach team by 80% due to staffing shortfalls.⁵ Seattle reassigned detectives from other beats just to handle an overload of sexual assault cases. America’s law enforcement is stretched to the breaking point.

Detroit is the largest US city by population to file for bankruptcy, which it did in 2013. The fiscal collapse left whole neighbourhoods without basic services and with drastically reduced policing. At one point, Detroit’s average emergency 911 response time was 58 minutes—a dire figure that underscores how thin law enforcement was stretched.⁶ Unsurprisingly, given our analysis in the first two articles, these conditions created a vacuum inviting alternative security arrangements. In response, armed neighbourhood patrols like the “Detroit 300” citizen force sprang up to deter crime, even conducting citizen’s arrests while collaborating with beleaguered police to “reclaim the streets”.

Across the US, as local police retreat, private security and vigilante-style groups have surged in to fill the safety void. Business owners, no longer confident that a call to 911 will bring help in time, are hiring private guards in record numbers. In Philadelphia, a gas station owner whose ATM was stolen waited six hours for police that never came—and promptly contracted an armed security team with military-style AR-15 rifles to patrol his property.⁷ He is far from alone. By 2021, the US had roughly 1.1 million private security guards versus 666,000 police officers—about 3.1 security guards for every 2 police officers.

“Private security is going to take over everything,” says one Philadelphia security firm head, noting that even families are hiring armed escorts for outings to the movies.⁸ Indeed, the private security industry has boomed since 2020,⁹ essentially outsourcing the monopoly of force to the highest bidder. This trend uncannily resembles the 19th-century American frontier or 1920s Prohibition era, when private enforcers and mob protection filled the gap left by official policing. It also mirrors the origins of Sicily’s Mafia, which began as private protection squads for hire by landowners and merchants when the newly unified Italian state couldn’t secure the countryside.

Communities are not just turning to paid security—some are turning to outright vigilantism. In crime-plagued parts of Detroit, frustrated residents formed the Detroit 300, a volunteer posse that patrols neighbourhoods and hunts down local criminals.¹⁰ This group, which is armed and organized like a paramilitary unit, has worked alongside the Detroit Police in raids and even helped solve serious crimes.¹¹

The scenario is reminiscent of the vigilantism of Sicily’s interior in the 1800s, when bands of campieri (armed watchmen) and eventually mafia cosche took on law enforcement roles on large estates. It also recalls how, after the collapse of Soviet authority in the 1990s, Russian entrepreneurs hired private muscle or outright mafia protection, because “official law” could no longer safeguard contracts or property—by the mid-90s it was commonly said that businesses in Russia couldn’t survive without mafia protection. In America today, we are seeing shades of that dynamic: legitimate businesses paying extra-legal protectors because the state’s shield is failing.

Other US cities show similar symptoms of sovereign devolution. In San Francisco, for instance, whole neighbourhoods like the Tenderloin have effectively become open-air drug markets where dealers operate with impunity. Street-level drug trade there is dominated by organized networks (many run by migrants from a single region in Honduras), complete with lookouts and a division of turf.¹² Police presence is so scarce that dealers brazenly sell fentanyl on the sidewalks. Officers intervene only in occasional large raids, a situation eerily parallel to Naples under the Camorra. In the mid-20th century, the Neapolitan Camorra oversaw open-air drug bazaars in certain slums, enforcing their own order inside these zones while the Italian police dared not enter except in force.

San Francisco’s beleaguered authorities have even ceded de facto control of some blocks to the drug crews. The result is a criminal micro-sovereignty: those who live or work in these areas must effectively abide by the dealers’ rules, not the state’s. A similar scenario unfolded in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, when the NYPD’s withdrawal from graffiti-covered subway trains and crime-ridden neighbourhoods led to citizen patrols like the Guardian Angels—or, less benignly, allowed gangs to stake quasi-territorial claims.

Even more stark was the brief emergence of an “autonomous zone” in Seattle in 2020. Amid civil unrest, police withdrew from the Seattle Capitol Hill neighbourhood, and armed “activists” proclaimed a self-governing enclave. What followed was ad hoc rule by whoever had force on their side—an episode that, while short-lived, provided a glimpse of warlordism on American soil. A local rapper-turned-militant styled himself the area’s protector,¹³ and residents reported that 911 calls went unanswered inside the zone. Such a thing would have been unthinkable only 20 years before.

This episode echoed, in miniature, the breakdown of state authority seen in places like 1990s Russia or early-20th-century Sicily, where rival factions filled the power vacuum. Though Seattle’s experiment ended after a few weeks, it underscored how quickly the monopoly on violence can slip from government hands if institutions lose control on the ground.

The United Kingdom

The United Kingdom is showing cracks in its own state authority, with overstrained police forces and the rise of alternative enforcers, especially in minority communities.

Over the past decade, policing in England and Wales has been hammered by budget austerity, personnel cuts, and scandals—and the effects are visible. In 2014, about 25% of crimes resulted in a “positive outcome”, meaning a suspect was charged, cautioned, or otherwise brought to justice. By 2024, that rate had collapsed to just 11%.¹⁴ In other words, nearly 9 out of 10 reported offenses go unsolved or unpunished. An official watchdog report in 2025 found police are “overwhelmed” by common offenses—assault, burglary, car theft, shoplifting—and often lack the time and resources to investigate even serious cases.¹⁵ Since 2015, recorded crime per capita jumped 44% while police staffing fell.¹⁶

The upshot is that many Britons have lost faith in the system’s ability to protect them. In some areas, calling the police for a burglary or car theft has become seen as futile. A recent analysis found that in nearly half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales, not a single burglary was solved over a three-year period.¹⁷ This erosion of basic security—one of the state’s core functions—creates the same fertile ground on which mafias have historically grown.

Perhaps the starkest example in the UK is found in Northern Ireland, where remnants of paramilitary groups have long operated as de facto enforcers in their communities. Decades after the Troubles, both republican and loyalist gangs still engage in so-called “punishment attacks”—extrajudicial shootings and beatings of those deemed to have broken community rules.¹⁸ Despite the UK state’s thin-skinned response to any challenge to its own sovereignty, in recent years, such attacks have even surged. Police data showed 101 paramilitary punishment shootings/beatings in 2017, a 60% increase from four years prior.¹⁹ In some hardline neighbourhoods, residents will approach the paramilitaries rather than police to resolve issues like drug dealing or anti-social behaviour. The paramilitaries have their own crude “courts” and penalties—such as kneecappings, exile orders, even killings—that bypass state law entirely.

This mirrors the Sicilian Mafia’s early role in the 19th century, when locals in bandit-infested regions turned to mafia dons to avenge thefts or enforce contracts since they distrusted the far-off official courts. It also resembles how the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta embedded itself in rural villages by enforcing an iron code of silence and offering protection in places where police presence was minimal. A 2015 RTÉ Investigations Unit report highlights the prevalence of paramilitary-style attacks and the difficulties in policing certain communities. The report notes that from 1990 to 2014, over 4,300 punishment-style attacks were reported, indicating a persistent issue with non-state actors enforcing their own forms of justice.²⁰

Elsewhere in the UK, organized criminal networks have filled voids in less overt ways. Urban gangs in major cities like London, Birmingham, and Manchester have carved up estates into “no-go” zones where they, not the police, set the rules. In London, for example, the notorious Stonebridge Estate—of overwhelming Afro-Caribbean ethnic makeup—in the 2000s became a fortress of crack cocaine gangs; “youths” there as young as 14 openly carried guns, and police hesitated to enter the warren of tower blocks without backup.²¹ Locals spoke of a “law of the jungle” prevailing on the estate, and it took a massive operation and a gang member turned informant to restore a semblance of order by 2010.²²

Similar stories play out today on a smaller scale in various “postcode turf” disputes, where knife-wielding “youth gangs” effectively control a few blocks and residents feel too intimidated to cooperate with authorities. While Britain is not Italy in the 1980s—where the Camorra or Cosa Nostra outright controlled towns—these no-go zones are a sign of things to come. They evoke the Camorra’s fragmented “mini-state” approach: dozens of independent clans ruling their patches of Naples, but perhaps even more ominous—whereas the Camorra sometimes provided Robin Hood-like charity to locals, these urban “youths” merely terrorize them.

But the most dire manifestation of state failure in the UK has been high-profile cases where entire communities were left unprotected due to institutional negligence. The child exploitation rings—colloquially termed “Pakistani rape gangs”—in Rotherham, Rochdale and other towns, where groups of men sexually abused hundreds of minors over years, are a tragic example. Local police and authorities—both due to dysfunction and fear of political incorrectness²³—effectively ceded sovereignty over law and order to the perpetrators within those communities. The gangs acted with impunity, enforcing silence through threats—a parallel to mafia-like control. As a former police officer testified during the “Casey inquiry” into the Rotherham grooming gangs:

Rotherham isn’t a very PC place, I think that is why the Council overcompensated too much. It doesn’t want to be accused of being racist. It is known that this happens, perpetrators have been known to say ‘I’ll use the race card.’

While not economically motivated like traditional organized crime, the way these grooming gangs supplanted the rule of law in their neighbourhoods is comparable to a criminal takeover of governance—victims and families had nowhere to turn, as the system’s legitimacy collapsed. It demonstrates that whenever the state is seen as unable or unwilling to uphold justice, alternative power—in this case, a predatory one—will capitalize on that void.

Australia

Australia’s institutions remain relatively robust, but even here there are signs of local governance breakdown that criminals or vigilantes are exploiting.

In early 2023, the remote town of Alice Springs became the epicentre of a public safety crisis. A surge of property crime and violent, alcohol-fuelled incidents mainly by Aboriginal youths left residents feeling besieged. One long-time resident reported that after intruders broke into her home, it took over 40 minutes for the police to arrive, by which time the perpetrators were long gone.²⁴ “The town’s under siege,” she said, describing how businesses and homeowners (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike) felt utterly unprotected.

In scenes reminiscent of an earlier frontier era, hundreds of locals packed emergency meetings and even called for military intervention to restore order. As frustration grew, there were fears of residents taking matters into their own hands, and officials warned against vigilantism.²⁵ The material conditions here—thin policing spread over vast distances, a spike in youth delinquency driven by social breakdown, and slow government response—mirror those that historically gave rise to outlaw justice.

Indeed, in parts of the Australian Outback, some remote Aboriginal communities have long relied on their own customary law or ad hoc community patrols because official law enforcement is hours or days away. This has occasionally led to violent “payback” punishments outside the state’s purview. Such parallel justice has echoes of how the ’Ndrangheta arose in Calabria: in impoverished, isolated villages, clan-based honour codes and reprisals filled the void left by absent state authority.

Australia’s cosmopolitan cities are not immune either. In Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, organized criminal gangs—from outlaw motorcycle clubs (“bikie” gangs) to ethnic crime syndicates—have exploited gaps in policing and political will. Outlaw bikie gangs in particular have established a formidable shadow presence in certain locales. They have been known to run protection rackets and control drug markets in suburban pockets, at times intimidating local businesses into following their rules.²⁶ In some cases, their reach has been facilitated by police corruption or incompetence. A notorious episode in Queensland during the 2010s saw revelations that a network of officers had been tipping off bikies and drug traffickers, compromising the state’s ability to enforce the law impartially.²⁷ While reforms followed, the incident underscored how deeply a criminal fraternity can penetrate when oversight falters—not unlike how the Sicilian Mafia infiltrated local Sicilian police and politics in the late 1800s.

In Queensland and Western Australia, recent crackdowns on bikie gangs (such as strict anti-association laws) came after periods when those gangs virtually ruled the nightlife in certain areas—dictating which security companies could operate at clubs, for example,²⁸ and meting out brutal punishment to interlopers.²⁹ This is a modern analogue to the Camorra in Naples, which historically infiltrated businesses and unions, deciding who got to work or win contracts. Just as the Camorra once inserted itself into every facet of Naples’ urban economy (even the garbage collection racket when the city failed to manage waste), Australia’s bikies and mobsters seek out any vacuum of authority or oversight.

One could argue that the 2000s waste management crisis in Naples—where Camorra clans took over trash disposal, illegally dumping toxic waste for profit while the government floundered—finds an antipodean parallel in Australia’s construction sector. In recent years, Australian construction unions and companies in Melbourne were found to have cosy relations with elements of organized crime, who offered “muscle” to enforce cartel pricing and keep out competitors.³⁰ Wherever money flows and regulation is weak, the dynamic recurs—crime syndicates insert themselves as the informal regulators or enforcers.

An especially illustrative incident occurred in the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023, which devastated parts of New Zealand and also affected southeastern Australia. In the Hawke’s Bay region of NZ, rumours of looting and slow official response led fed-up locals to set up their own roadblock checkpoints and allegedly even assault some suspected looters. Police had to issue a warning to residents “not to dish out their own justice”, after reports that locals were banding together to chase and beat thieves amid the post-disaster chaos.³¹

While this example comes from New Zealand, Australian communities face similar temptations when disasters strike or crime spikes—a feeling that “we have to defend ourselves because the authorities can’t.” Notably, in New Zealand’s case, local gangs such as the Mongrel Mob initially volunteered to help distribute supplies and protect property after the cyclone, seeking to present themselves as community guardians. This had a dual effect: some residents were thankful for any help, while others feared the gangs were exploiting the situation to assert control.

The image of gang members stepping in where the state was absent is evocative of the Yakuza in Japan, who famously mobilized aid convoys faster than the government after the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2011 tsunami. They could move with an agility that government bureaucracy lacked, thus reinforcing their role as an alternative authority. Likewise, the Mongrel Mob’s post-cyclone relief efforts (however self-interested) played on their semi-legitimate standing in certain communities.

Canada

Canada, often perceived as stable and orderly, is experiencing its own slide toward conditions that empower criminal enterprises.

After decades of decline, violent crime has ticked up in recent years. The national homicide rate rose 8% in 2022 to reach its highest level in 30 years.³² Police services across the country are contending with staffing challenges and growing workloads. From 2010 to 2022, for example, Toronto’s population grew by 13% while its number of police officers fell by 11%, leading to stretched patrols and rising 911 response times.³³ In rural areas and some indigenous communities, policing is even sparser; many far-north towns rely on a handful of Mounties covering hundreds of kilometres, meaning help can be hours away. Criminal elements have not missed these opportunities.

One area of concern is organized crime infiltration of local economies and institutions, which creates a form of parallel governance behind a lawful facade. A notorious case happened in the province of Quebec, where the construction industry was found to be deeply corrupted by mafia influence throughout the 2000s. The Charbonneau Commission, a public inquiry, revealed that the Italian Mafia and other gangs had effectively set up a cartel within the construction sector. Mafia bosses acted as arbitrators between construction contractors—deciding who would win bids, how to rig prices, and settling disputes—in exchange for kickbacks.³⁴ In other words, they ran a shadow regulatory system on top of the official public contract process.

This echoes how the Sicilian Cosa Nostra infiltrated public works in Italy, controlling who got municipal construction contracts and skimming off profits, to the point that dozens of town governments in Sicily have been dissolved for mafia entanglement. In Montreal, evidence came to light that certain city officials colluded with crime groups such that organized crime became an extra-legal authority in construction, a vital public service domain.³⁵

The parallel with historical mafia sovereignty is clear—when the formal governance framework failed,³⁶ the underworld provided its own governance through intimidation-enforced collusion and “dispute resolution” among contractors. While the Charbonneau Commission led to reforms, the episode underscored how even in a modern Canadian city, lax oversight and corruption allowed a criminal consortium to assume quasi-governmental powers over an industry.

Meanwhile, Canada’s big cities are grappling with more visible manifestations of criminal power. Vancouver has been rocked by brazen gang violence as rival organized crime groups battle over the drug trade. Public shootouts have occurred in broad daylight—including a notorious incident where gangsters opened fire and killed a rival outside a downtown luxury hotel in Whistler in 2022, terrifying tourists.³⁷ In the Vancouver area, police in 2021 took the unusual step of issuing a public warning with names and photos of 11 known gangsters, essentially telling citizens that these individuals posed a “significant threat to the public” if encountered.³⁸

This kind of announcement—effectively admitting that certain criminals are so dangerous and impossible to apprehend that the public should beware—betrays a weakness in the state’s grip on the monopoly of violence. It’s an acknowledgment that informal power is influencing how ordinary people must behave, akin to how terrified civilians in 1990s Moscow had to be mindful of mafia turf, or how residents of Camorra-controlled Naples had to tiptoe around the local clan.

Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area rife with open drug use and poverty, also illustrates the tenuous balance. There, local volunteer groups and NGOs do much of the day-to-day governance that one might expect city authorities to handle, while fentanyl dealers conduct business largely unhindered. It’s not that the Canadian state has disappeared—but in pockets, it either cannot or will not exercise sovereignty. Those pockets can serve as beachheads for organized crime to entrench itself as an alternative authority, much as New York’s Mafia families in the early 20th century first secured control of specific neighbourhoods and then expanded their influence from there.

Additionally, Canada has seen an uptick in vigilantism and armed self-defense in response to crime, though on a smaller scale than the US. In rural Alberta and Saskatchewan, for instance, there have been cases of farmers forming posse-like groups to confront property thieves, born of frustration with slow police response in remote areas.³⁹ These incidents sometimes end tragically or in legal battles over self-defense—reminiscent of frontier justice. The very fact that such groups form is a symptom of perceived state inadequacy. It is worth noting that historically, many recognized police forces began as citizen militias or posses.⁴⁰ The risk is that if faith in the official system erodes further, more Canadians might endorse “DIY policing,” opening the door for charismatic strongmen or outlaw groups to claim a mandate to keep the peace.

Historical Echoes

Taken together, these examples from the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand paint a disquieting picture. In each country, we find material conditions resembling those that birthed parallel powers of the past.