Who is Ritchie Wellman? He is a father, a boyfriend, an assistant operations manager at a local business and a part-time paedophile hunter. Right now, however, at 7 p.m. in a dusty car park down the road from Bournemouth pier, Ritchie is the commander of his own private policing unit, briefing his officers before their first patrol. He tells them not to assault anybody, not to be provoked, not to drink or smoke on the job, and to reassure the public if they are concerned by this new authority on their streets: ‘This is not a takeover.’
Ritchie is a normal guy, and he and his officers and others in Bournemouth like them believe that their town is falling apart and that the state is not coming to save it. They say rapes, stabbings, violent disorder and anti-social behaviour are turning their home into somewhere that they do not recognise. The police attempted to make it safer but failed. Now the people try.
Ritchie’s unit is called Safeguard Force, and in the car park he tells tonight’s 16 volunteer officers that they will split into four patrols, each with four people. Two groups will be stationed on the seafront on either side of the pier, one will watch the town centre, and the last will take the ‘gardens’, a park area behind the beach where recently at night there has been a lot of crime. They will wear high-vis jackets and some of them bodycams, and they will work until 1 a.m. ‘This is going to go across the country,’ Ritchie tells his officers. ‘It’s going to be fucking fantastic.’ His girlfriend stands near and looks at him and beams as he nervously speaks these confident words.
Officers will act primarily as a deterrent to criminality, Ritchie explains to the group. They should observe and record any offences they see, and perform a citizen’s arrest only in the last resort. They have few legal powers. They should not try to be heroes. ‘I can’t just stand there and watch someone get stabbed,’ says an officer called Del, who looks like a man familiar with the harder side of life. ‘I’m not saying for a second that you should let that guy get stabbed to death,’ Ritchie replies. ‘But the police would tell you to consider yourself first.’ With this uncomfortable ambiguity, the question of whether these unarmed volunteers should intervene in a stabbing is left.
Out on the seafront people smile at the officers, and many say they feel safer for them being there. One team is asked to fix a lock on a disabled loo and to recommend a coffee shop. A group elsewhere stops a fight. Each interaction gives Safeguard Force legitimacy. Ritchie keeps saying he doesn’t want to usurp the police, but that decision is being taken out of his hands.
As the sun sets on Alum Chine, a man on a run yells ‘cunts’ at our patrol on the promenade. He jogs off, returns, and throws up his middle fingers. He scuttles away again. All the officers are wearing high vis jackets with ‘Safeguard Force’ printed on the back, and many people will have read bad things about the group online. I guess this runner is one of them. A few days ago, there was a protest in Bournemouth against the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, and a number of people have assumed that Safeguard Force, coming at a similar time, is the design of a radical segment of the demonstrators.
Ritchie actually started Safeguard Force because he gets worried about his girlfriend walking through the gardens alone. Just the other day a guy was jumped there by three men. ‘Oh God’, Ritchie thinks to himself when she calls and says she’s passing through. People like him, residents of Britain’s hopeless towns and cities, are done waiting for the state to sort this stuff out. Many see the authorities, and increasingly the police, as an obstacle to order. Outside the Bell Hotel in Epping a few weeks ago, I watched protestors turn on the police. Once upon a time those same people wanted more officers in their town. I don’t think they all do now.
Many see the authorities, and increasingly the police, as an obstacle to order
Ritchie is not new to seeing the flaws in Britain’s old authorities. For the last four years, he’s been a part-time paedophile hunter, first for a group called STOP, and now for one called The Underworld. Paedophile hunters lure online predators by posing as children on messaging apps. They confront the predator in person and humiliate them by livestreaming their interaction. The justice is fast and mean. Three other members of The Underworld, which operates nationwide, are part of Safeguard Force, and Ritchie says that if his unit works well, perhaps other members of the group will start their own private policing units like his.
While the evening passes calmly, I talk to Lance Murdoch and Andy PG, a mental pair from a subversive local news outlet called Rise Above, who are also covering Safeguard Force’s launch. Back in the 1990s when Bournemouth was a clubbing destination, Andy was a DJ and Lance his MC, and people came from London to watch them perform. Those were happier days. Lance and Andy started Rise Above together during Covid, which in their words covers everything from ‘mainstream stories to conspiratorial mind bombs’.
Rise Above has done well in this time of odd flux, pushing videos out on social media from what Lance calls the Bournemouth’s ‘front line’, where there are three migrant hotels on one road. ‘We’ve gone a little bit viral in the last few weeks,’ says Andy. ‘No one tells us what to say or think,’ says Lance. The hotel protests, Safeguard Force, it feels to these guys like something bigger is coming. ‘All eyes are on Bournemouth,’ Lance tells me as we walk along the promenade. Andy agrees. The old authorities are declining. In the dark, a new town is being born.
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