Approximately 100 white men armed with baseball bats, hammers, and shovels were roaming the streets of a Philadelphia neighborhood in the name of vigilantism.
On Tuesday, local city officials pledged to crack down on what they called simmering vigilantism after seeing as many as 100 white men armed with baseball bats and hammers roaming in the Fishtown section for hours on this is@whats happening in fishtown in Philly.
I got called out for recording them and they beat the shit out of me and pushed my girlfriend pic.twitter.com/JMeR4SJ7y9
— Jon Ehrens (@jwehrens) June 2, 2020
At around 8 p.m., the police lined up in the street to keep the two groups separated and asked them to disperse.
Mayor Jim Kenney on Tuesday criticized how the police officers handled the vigilante group, saying: “We tolerated it last night for too long, and that was a mistake.”
He said he was “disturbed” by reports of officers high-fiving members of the group, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said the force does not condone “any form of vigilante justice or taking the law into one’s own hands.”
