SALT LAKE CITY — Red Voltage and two of his masked crime-fighting colleagues were approaching an intersection here in Utah’s capital on a recent evening, walking night patrol on foot, when a car suddenly slowed next to them. The night was bitterly cold, laced with a wispy stew of fog that might or might not conceal a thousand dangers. The car’s window rolled down.
“Hi, superheroes!” a woman shouted from within. “I’m in love with you guys!”
Eat your heart out, Batman. In a niche of urban life that has evolved in recent years somewhere between comic-book fantasy and the Boy Scout oath, a cadre of self-cast crusaders — some with capes, some without, all with something to prove — are on the march.
They prowl the night in Boston, in San Francisco, in Milwaukee, in Minneapolis, even as far away as Australia. Whether they are making the world safer or just weirder remains an open question.
Some go out armed with gear like mace, pepper spray or police batons; others say they carry only cellphones, aiming to be eyes and ears for the police, who in most cities, including Salt Lake City, are keeping a wary distance.
“We’re not endorsing them, supporting them, condemning them or anything else — we’re staying neutral and out of it,” said Detective Joshua Ashdown, a spokesman for the Salt Lake City Police Department. “The ones we endorse are the ones we have trained.”
Red Voltage, who in mild-mannered daytime life is a 23-year-old residential leasing manager named Roman Daniels, casually waved a gloved hand to his female drive-by fan. Clad head to toe in a red-and-black leather suit, his face covered by spandex, he is, he said, a different man when the mask goes on — a better man.
“But there are times when I’m putting the suit on, and I’m just like, ‘How crazy am I to do this?’ I do feel odd and out of the box,” said Mr. Daniels, who took over leadership of the group here, called the Black Monday Society, about six months ago, after two years of patrols. “But it’s good,” he added. “It feels really good — for the most part.”
Mike Gailey, a burly former bouncer at a strip club whose crime-fighting persona is called Asylum, said that for him, joining the Black Monday Society was partly about making amends for things in his past, like the time he spent collecting debts for drug dealers.
“I was a thug,” said Mr. Gailey, 31. “There are a lot of guys like me that have pasts they’re trying to make up for.”
Another Black Monday patroller described himself as a former gang member. The group’s co-founder, Dave Montgomery, a tattoo artist known in the street as the black-leather-clad Nihilist, said he was a former alcoholic who put on the mask when he stopped drinking.
That crime fighters would have issues is, of course, a time-honored tradition, too. Superman was sent to Earth by his parents. The X-Men are ostracized mutants. And let’s not even get started on the wealthy Bruce Wayne — he of the Bat Cave and Boy Wonder sidekick.
Some crime fighters have run afoul of authority. In Seattle, for example, a man in a muscle suit, Phoenix Jones, was arrested in October after the police said he pepper-sprayed some people while trying to break up a street fight.
Other masked avengers, past and present, have had very specific agendas in fighting societal ills. In the early 2000s, for example, a woman in New York, whose persona was Terrifica, took to patrolling pick-up bars in pink and purple spandex.
“She had apparently had some bad experiences with men,” said Tea Krulos, a writer in Milwaukee who is researching a book on what he and others call the “real-life superhero movement.” “Her mission was to warn drunk women that they might not be making good decisions.”
New attitudes about the police might also be affecting how the crime fighters are perceived. Here in Salt Lake City, for example, a Black Monday patrol going past the Occupy Salt Lake City encampment in a downtown plaza on a recent night was greeted very warmly. A nonpolice crime watch, several protesters said, is more than welcome these days.
“This is this exactly what needs to happen in the world — you know, why do we need police when we can help each other out?” said Poyce Denikma, 21, a former construction worker who is now a protester. “They’re setting an example, an amazing example, for what needs to happen.”
Other people who encountered the patrol were not so sure.
“I’m still thinking about it,” said Rebecca Vest, a Seattle resident who was in Salt Lake City for a friend’s wedding and had gone out for a walk. Ms. Vest said the incident in her city involving the superhero with the pepper spray had raised some worries.
“But I think sometimes just the presence of people helps, and they’re certainly not hiding in the woodwork,” she said, after posing for a photograph with the Black Monday patrol. “They’re right out there, going, ‘Hey, here we are.’ ”
Mr. Montgomery, or Nihilist, said masks were everywhere once you started to look. What is hidden and what is revealed by disguise, he said, is the basic psychology of a superhero’s life.
“It’s almost Freudian,” he said. “When you wear a mask, you’re actually able to become who you really are. It becomes kind of like a drug.”
He acknowledged that dressing up in what some might see as Halloween attire has at times made Black Monday patrollers a target for crime themselves, or at least abuse. But he said that intelligence and reason almost always defuse the occasional tension with drunks or other toughs who might see the patrollers as targets to be bullied.
“Once we start talking, they don’t really see us as chumps or dorks in suits,” he said.
Lately, though, Mr. Montgomery has been patrolling less and parenting more.
He has joint custody with his ex-wife of their 5-year-old daughter, Frankie, and Frankie stays with her father most nights. But on Thursdays and Fridays, she goes to her mother’s, leaving two nights off for suiting up and going on patrol.
“Got your blankey?” he asked her as they prepared to head to her kindergarten class on a recent morning. Inside, the children were preparing for a holiday party — each child assigned to prepare a secret gift for another student. Even before first grade, Frankie was working undercover.
“Remember, you’re a Secret Santa,” Mr. Montgomery whispered to her. “Don’t tell.”
