Delivering natural justice to boy racers, Cicero style
Wednesday, 3 June 2026
Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.
OPINION: This is the story of Ben Savidge of Napier. But first let me introduce Cicero, the Roman orator. Two thousand years ago, Cicero laid out the concept of natural law.
“There is indeed a law… commanding us to do what is right, forbidding us to do what is wrong. It has dominion over good men, but possesses no influence over bad ones… It is not one thing at Rome, and another thing at Athens: one thing to-day, and another thing to-morrow; but it is eternal and immutable for all nations and for all time.”
This natural law, then, gives us our instinct for right and wrong without our having to be taught it. Back to Mr Savidge.
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Mr Savidge, his partner and their two little children moved into a house 18 months ago only to discover that the area was popular with boy racers. The boy-racers did the usual – revving engines, smoking tyres, sending late-night ape-rock pulsing through the landscape. For the Savidges it was maddening. Their children couldn’t sleep. They couldn’t sleep.
Cicero had little to say about boy racers, but then he didn’t have to. Natural law tells us these louts were in the wrong. By their actions they had robbed the Savidges of peace of mind, and any jury would find them guilty without legal instruction. The boy racers’ one possible defence would be that they didn’t realise the effects of their actions.
Hoping to appeal to their humanity, Mr Savidge went to talk to the boy racers. He found no humanity to appeal to. The encounter grew heated and Mr Savidge withdrew. He had done what he could, so he called the council.
Try the police, said the council. Mr Savidge tried the police. Repeatedly. Sometimes the police were too busy. Occasionally they sent a car. By the time the car arrived the racers had always moved on.
But every time, back they came, to wake the children and madden the parents. Eventually Mr Savidge had had enough. We are urged not to take the law into our own hands, but if the authorities won’t take it into theirs, well, no good man will let his family suffer.
When next the boy racers gathered, Mr Savidge stole up on them unseen, armed with a paint-ball gun. And he let rip. As 500 paint balls splattered against their beloved cars, the boy racers squealed and ran.
That surge of pleasure you are feeling, that sense of justice being done, is straight out of Cicero. Mr Savidge felt it too. “I was just laughing my head off,” he said. It was a sense that the universe had flipped the right way up again.
Shortly afterwards Mr Savidge’s home was surrounded. Not, as one might imagine, by vengeful boy racers, but by the armed offenders squad, with guns and dogs and seven vehicles.
In other words, precisely the sort of force that somehow could never be found to address the problem of the boy racers, was instantaneously available to address the non-problem of Mr Savidge.
Mr Savidge has since pleaded guilty to protecting his family and been sentenced to 40 hours community service. Meanwhile the boy racers have been sentenced to nothing and have taken to taunting Mr Savidge, and doing skids outside his house.
Those hours of community service are the only bright spot in the story. Mr Savidge should be allowed to spend them recruiting a rapid-response Battalion of Suburban Guerrillas, every member of which is to be provided with, and trained in the use of, a high-capacity paint-ball gun. (He won’t lack for recruits. If there’s no upper age limit, I’ll volunteer in a heartbeat.) Any hours left over should be spent reading Cicero to the Napier chief of police.