On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 21:54:22 +0000, Steve Walker
wrote:

"Think" is not the right word and neither is "innocent". There's a big
difference between "suspecting" that someone has your stolen tools and
having actually seen him take them from your vehicle and make off with them!

There is also a similar difference between "suspecting" that someone
has committed GBH, and actually seeing him beating up a youngster in
the street.

In the theft case the "thief" may believe that he has the moral right
to take the tools, and in the second case the pugalist believes he has
the moral right to inflict GBH. Can you not see that the two
situations are exactly the same - a person acting outside the law
because he thinks he has the right to do so?

No they are not the same situations, despite the law being broken in
both cases.

In one someone is stealing an innocent person's tools of his trade. He
has no right to do so and no right to think that he can - even if he
thinks that they are his relative's tools, he has nothing to confirm
(even to himself) that that is the case.

In the other case, the victim of the theft, has actually seen the person
taking the tools and therefore there is no doubt about the guilt of the
thief, however he has no way to prove to the authorities that that is
the case and therefore no recompense or punishment will follow.

And what if he collars the wrong person in the same way that the thief
collared the wrong tools? By the time he got down from the roof, the
person he saw may be far away, but another youth who looks similar is
seen and mistaken for the perpetrator.

So if a person has no right to take goods that he thinks were stolen
from him, surely he also has no right to beat up a person who he
thinks he saw take them?

I read an amusing article today about a policeman who was chasing
himself. A CCTV operator had originally mistaken the plainclothes
policeman for a "person acting suspiciously". That info had been
passed to the policeman himself, who then attempted to find and catch
the suspicious individual by following information received from the
CCTV operator who was tracking the suspect. Eventually it was
realised what was happening and everyone had a laugh. But I
immediately thought to myself, what if an innocent person had happened
to walk into the area? The probability woul dbe that the innocent
person would be mistaken for the suspect, and an unpleasant time for
the innocent person would follow.

--
Cynic