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There is to be an urgent review of the law protecting those who intervene in criminal situations in England and Wales, the government is to announce.
Justice Secretary Jack Straw, who has been a "have-a-go hero" four times, said he wanted to clarify "that the law is on the side of the citizen".
Both he and the home secretary are due to address the Labour Party conference.
He will say self-defence law works "much better than most people think, but not as well as it could or should".
Mr Straw wants to reassure victims or witnesses that they can use reasonable force to stop and detain offenders.
'Good citizens'
Labour's gathering in Bournemouth will draw to a close on Thursday with the party's traditional send-off, delivered by deputy leader Harriet Harman.
Before then, Mr Straw will say he knows "from personal experience that you have all of a millisecond to make the judgement about whether to intervene" in a crime.
"The justice system must not only work on the side of people who do the right thing as good citizens but also be seen to work on their side."
Of the four times when Mr Straw has intervened to stop criminals, he managed to detain the offender on three occasions.
In 1980 he overheard a burglar breaking into a members club in his Blackburn constituency, chased him down the street and detained him until police arrived.
In the mid 1980s at Oval Tube station in south London he came across an 11-year-old boy who had just been robbed by a man and detained the offender.
He chased a man who had attacked a woman at the same underground station in the early 1990s, but did not catch him.
Then in 1996 he chased a man who had robbed a member of the public and detained the suspect until police arrived.
Public 'anxiety'
"I was presented, just by chance, with being a witness to criminal behaviour and thought I should intervene," Mr Straw told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"You haven't got time in that situation to wonder where does the balance lie - what constitutes reasonable force."
He went on: "No-one knows whether you're going to intervene until it happens.
"Those that do intervene in this situation face the anxiety that they'll be the subject of a police investigation.
"Too many unnecessary police investigations take place. I want to make the law clearer."
Mr Straw wants people to be aware that the Criminal Law Act 1967 allows them to use reasonable force to apprehend suspects, but was not advocating recklessness, his spokesman said.
Government 'confused'
However, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, Nick Clegg, said the law did not need to be changed as it was "already very, very clear" that "proportionate, reasonable force" could be used.
"My concern, frankly, is the government appears to be a bit confused," he told BBC Radio Five Live.
"On the one hand, Straw seems to be saying the law is working better than people think.
"On the other hand he seems to be stoking up public fear, if you like, by saying 'I'm going to review it', but not really saying in what way it's going to be reviewed."
The Association of Chief Police Officers, the Crown Prosecution Service, judges and other government ministers are expected to be consulted during the review.
Meanwhile Home Secretary Jacqui Smith's speech will cover, among other issues, Labour's commitment to give local people more information about the performance of local police, and tougher checks on people travelling to the UK.
Been done before but always good for a debate to see who's hard.
Reviewed meaning, we'll kick it around for a while then if its looks to be popular add it to the bottom of the legislative program for the next parliamentary session that can be kicked off at any time if it starts to look unpopular or illegal.
Imo this is the worst kind of Daily Mail pandering politics.
There is nothing wrong with the law on self-defence. It says that you have the right to use reasonable force against an intruder that you discover on your property, or if you get attacked, and so on. Whether force is reasonable depends upon the nature of the threat bearing in mind all the circumstances and is subjective. So you only have to show what you were worrying about, not whether it was objectively reasonable.
I can only think of two occasions when self-defence was held not to be reasonable. Both involved the people in question shooting the burglar. There was that Tony Martin chap, who shot a fleeing burglar in the back, and a loon who locked himself in his allotment shed and shot someone when he heard noises outside.
I'd strongly argue that neither of those cases were reasonable.
Whereas I remember a case where a burglar got battered with a baseball bat and that was ok. So the moral seems to be: don't use guns.
What's wrong with that ffs?
Quite why the government, other than to play the inane lowest common denominator red rag populist card, need to do this now is anyone's guess.
I was listening to this on Radio Five Live this morning.
Straw wants the ambiguity in the law to be better defined, so that people who do defend themselves don't need to go through a four or five month legal process under the threat of prosecution. So to save anxiety - he wants clearer definitions so the threat of prosecution is lifted quicker.
I was walking home from football one night with a friend when we saw this girl being sexually assaulted by a guy in a park. Knocked him to the ground and sat on him until the police arrived.
'Self-defence' law to be reviewed 
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