Vivacia I am a bit puzzled by your comment that you are against vigilantism but had sympathy for the vigilantes. Can you explain what you mean. You mention that you think police spend their time catching murderers and rapists and neighbourhood policing. I think you'll find that the figures for crime detection are incredibly low - around 30% I think, dependent on the geographical area.
I think the biggest problem for the police is the excessive amount of paperwork with which they are faced. This is in common with all other employees of public services, e.g. teachers, social workers, nurses, doctors etc. and in my view this is because the govt don't trust these people to be competent enough to carry out their jobs. SO they insist on ridiculous tick box exercises as evidence that certain tasks have been carried out. I think for the police this is definitely the case - I saw a programme about this fairly recently and it was made clear that in an 8 hour shift if someone was arrested for a fairly minor offence (possession of cannabis for own use) that would take the PC off the beat for the remainder of his/her shift because of processing the suspect and completion of the paperwork. Crazy!
Also the police have targets to meet (which employees, private or public) don't these days! And that's another issue as they need to try to maintain their targets, so they will (on their own admission) pick up a kid for possession of a small amount of an illegal drug, knowing that they can tick the right box and maintain their targets. Crazy again!
I think the Stinson Hunter's motivation was clearly related to his past experience of being sexually abused and whilst I can see he was well motivated, I can also see that there could be some very ugly scenes and violence if the vigilantes are seen following a paedophile (as we saw in the programme - a crowd had gathered but the police car drew up) so that of course would cause more problems for the police and I can't say I'm in favour of summary justice. Maybe this is what you meant Vivacia