Limitations of strength in numbers
It's a good post, LICCW, but again your looking at a tactical solution; people confronting a bad situation head on with force on force. A mob of homeowners trying to show bravado and beat down some punks is a vigilante mob; there's a time and place for that, but probably not to fight simple vandalism.
What I'm talking about is the "broken window" syndrome. If you have an abandoned building with no broken windows and cleaned up, it may stay that way forever. But once one window gets broken, if it stays broken, the building looks run down and suddenly more people are throwing rocks. And pretty soon all of the windows are broken. And then it makes the whole neighborhood look run down, and then people are breaking windows in other houses. As has been proven a million times in the real world, if you fight the little crimes you reduce the big crimes.
So you live in a bad neighborhood, and the cops don't care because when something does happen everyone around turns a blind eye and doesn't want to get involved.
Talking with your neighbors, you may discover there are other like minded individuals as yourself. So you start a program of neighborhood watching -- running video cameras, taking turns watching, and always calling the police for trouble. And then supporting the police en masse when they show up, so the BG's involved don't have a single complaintant to look at. Yeah -- gang bangers have no problem intimidating, beating or killing one person or family. But when a whole community stands against them and makes it clear that reprisals will bring more calls to the police and more convictions ... things change.
Back in the violence of the 80's there was a drive by shooting in a bad neighborhood in Denver that resulted in a little girl getting killed. Right afterwards the gang bangers drove around, making eye contact with everyone on the streets and throwing gang signs to let them know they'd better not talk to the cops.
But this was the last in a number of shootings, and for whatever reason this neighborhood had had enough. The police had locals lining up to give descriptions and the shooters were quickly in jail. The more locals that stepped forward, the more that found the courage to do so.
If one person had reported in, he or his family would be dead. Since they all reported the situation in, the gang decided to move the worst of their operations out.
On this site we like to think of the lone warrior -- the Charles Bronson -- dropping all the bad guys and cleaning up the neighborhood. But you only see that in the movies for a reason; it doesn't work in real life.