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Youtube Crime

'The Disturbing Rise of Amateur Predator-Hunting Stings' (newyorker.com) 228

In 2004 NBC's news show "Dateline" began airing "To Catch a Predator" segments, in which a vigilante group posed online as minors to lure sex predators into in-person meetings — where they were then arrested by police.

The New Yorker looks at its cultural impact: Although there were only twenty episodes of the series, in three years, it's "this touchstone that I grew up with and that millions of people grew up with," Paul Renfro, a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of "Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State," said. "It shaped how people think about sexual violence in ways that we haven't fully grappled with." The show focussed on the threat from strangers on the Internet, even though most victims of child sexual abuse are harmed by someone known to them. "On the show, it's not the family, it's not priests or rabbis or other authority figures who pose a threat to children, it's this devious stranger," Renfro said. The show's influence helped spur the passage of the Adam Walsh Act, in 2006, which created publicly searchable databases of people convicted of certain sex crimes. (There's little evidence that sex-offender registries have been effective at reducing sexual offenses.)
But today, "amateur predator hunting has come back into style," the article notes, citing the proliferation of online groups. "Recently, the Washington Post found more than a hundred and sixty, which have been responsible for nearly a thousand stings this year."

And then the New Yorker interviewed a woman named Cam, who with her husband and her brother-in-law decided to form "the Permian Basin Predator Patrol" — broadcasting their sting operations and humiliations of potential perpetrators on YouTube: [S]oon after the channel started drawing attention, they were called to a meeting at the Odessa Police Department. According to Cam, officers made it clear that they disapproved of their activities. "We were told we can't be involved with them, and that we can't send them anything directly," she said. "One, we're endangering ourselves, and, two, we're giving them more work — that's what it seemed like they were saying."

"We are very mindful of not trying to entrap a suspect," Lieutenant Brad Cline, who works in the Odessa Police Department's Crimes Against Persons Unit, said. "Taking a predator into custody can be very dangerous as well."

The article points out that "To Catch a Predator" was cancelled when Texas man Bill Conradt decided not to follow-up on his online messages — but "When a SWAT team burst into his house, trailed by a camera crew, Conradt shot himself."

So what did Cam's group do when the Odessa Police Department declined their help? The Permian Basin Predator Patrol continued to make videos. If she couldn't contribute to an arrest, Cam thought, at least she could get the word out to the public. She became an expert at figuring out the identities of the men she was chatting with, even when they used fake names.... Sometimes she'd find a man's family on Facebook and send his mother screenshots of the obscene messages he'd sent, or call his employer. "I believe three of them have been let go from their jobs," she said.

A sting by the Predator Catchers Indianapolis led to a man's conviction for child solicitation.... Although YouTube's predator hunters tend to portray themselves as the unequivocal good guys (Cam is an exception — most are men), their track record is more mixed.... The Ohio-based group Dads Against Predators has reportedly been banned from local grocery stores for causing disturbances. In 2018, a twenty-year-old in Connecticut hanged himself after a confrontation with a predator-hunter group. One video by the Permian Basin Predator Patrol ends with a man weeping, then running into traffic. (Cam said that she asked police to perform a welfare check on him, but she's not sure if it occurred.)

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'The Disturbing Rise of Amateur Predator-Hunting Stings'

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  • by VAElynx ( 2001046 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @01:51PM (#63029457)
    However, it *does* throw a wrench in the cogs of governments using pedos as an excuse to try and remove encryption and mandate full-scale message scanning ,allegedly for such illegal content.

    In case anyone doesn't see why this is wrong... statistically, there's a nonzero number of basements in the US at the moment where someone is held against their will. However, giving the police arbitrary warrant powers to address this, or even better, mandate inspections in every civillian dwelling would be similarly obscene, just more obvious.
    • Where's Epstein's client list?
      Why is Maxwell in prison for trafficking girls to nobody?

      There's a reason vigilantes exist and that is profligate corruption.

      FBI sits on evidence of child sex crimes and everybody knows it.

    • However, it *does* throw a wrench in the cogs of governments using pedos as an excuse to try and remove encryption and mandate full-scale message scanning ,allegedly for such illegal content.

      Considering it could be a groomer in the family, [imgur.com] they'll ignore that part. Further reading [mitchellrepublic.com].

    • She became an expert at figuring out the identities of the men she was chatting with

      I found this bit very disturbing. There's a huge number of ways to remain quite anonymous while communicating. Certainly, anonymous enough to anyone without the backing of a court warrant.

      Either she was just guessing (highly likely) about the identity of people, which has the added side effect of guessing wrong and ruining the lives of innocent people.

      Or she was using less-than-legal tactics to social engineer information out of phone and Internet companies which risks basically torpedoing any real police i

  • Sadism with a Halo (Score:5, Informative)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @02:19PM (#63029533)

    There is no question that the massive appeal of the original To Catch A Predator [imdb.com] series was the idea that there would be fewer guys out there trying to trick little kids into having sex with them. A righteous cause.

    Yet I was always repulsed by the salacious glee the producers took at squeezing as much misery on camera as they could from the perps. Yeah these guys don't warrant a lot of sympathy and who doesn't get that, but the "why don't you go sit down over there for me" routine was all too popular with the fans but to me indistinguishable from just having their hired muscle curb-stomp the guy into the ER.

    With this and the imitator vigilante groups, I really get the feeling that the primary point of the activity is not to protect children, but to bully someone and have the crowd cheer them on. They want to see the blood of the bad guy and this lets them do it with no penalty or backlash.

    • The primary point was ratings and advertiser dollars. It's a TV show after all and that means it's a business.

      If people actually cared about protecting children we'd legalized drugs and treat the hard stuff as a medical condition and then take all the money we spend on our political drug war and spend it safely tracking down sex predators.
    • There is a similar concept of show regarding traffic surveillance. It usually involves the camera crew and the police positioning themselves in front of a school or kindergarten and pull out drivers going over the speed limit, regardless of the actual danger of the situation. Then one of kids is sent to the driver with a microphone asking them in the most innocent voice "why they went too fast". It's hard to believe the behaviour of the policement isn't influenced if it's whitehat vs. blackhat on camera.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      The primary motivations of such groups are 1) to shame the perpetrators and 2) to shame the police departments.

      The show focussed on the threat from strangers on the Internet, even though most victims of child sexual abuse are harmed by someone known to them.

      True. And often it's a person with power and standing in the community that local police refuse to deal with. We had a case in my town that involved a minister who volunteered at the Boys and Girls club. Complaints from several parents got nowhere. To the point that a TV news reporter showed up at the police department, shoved a camera in the chief's face and asked, "What are you doing about this?"

    • Come on, he handled them with kid gloves. Giving them 5-10 minutes to settle their thoughts before the police began their interrogation probably got them lighter sentences. Yes, their lives were falling apart on camera, but Chris asking them why they did it did not contribute to this.

    • The bad guys are very common as is molestation. Joy at the righteous destruction of evil is legitimate be it genocidal Russian troops in Ukraine or a Texas DA making the right choice to kill himself.

      What should we feel when evil is put to the sword or falls upon its own out of shame? I've seen what pedos did to those I loved. Kill them all, and when new pedos appear kill them for dead predators cease to be a problem. Those of us who choose to be good citizens deserve a world without sexual predators be they

  • by Slashythenkilly ( 7027842 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @02:25PM (#63029557)
    between a gang of "predator hunters" or the Proud Boys and clones who self deputized themselves to justify harrassing citizens. If ghey wanted to use some white hat skills to collect a mountain of evidence against someone then turn it over to police, thats fine but contacting family memers, employers, and intimidating someone is completely unacceptable. Police and law enforcement cant do that for a reason, mainly it tarnishes any legal case you could make. Good detective work has to be airtight and its rmbarrsssing enough when SWAT shows up to raid a home only to find out the phone number has been duped or the router has been hacked by someone outside the home. Vigilantism allows for no checks and balances, examination of evidence by an objective 3rd party, and seeks to exact revenge rather than pursue truth and justice.
  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @02:32PM (#63029597)
    Is that it's going to cross pollinate with right-wing politics and the lies about gays and trans people being pedophiles at higher rates than general populace. I can see you stochastic terrorism being a huge problem with this. You already see a lot of prominent members of the lgbtq+ community being accused nonsensical
    • Yeah, its definitely coming. They already show up at pride events to wave guns around and call us "groomers", actual violence driven by some misinformation/agitprop campaign like this is a distressingly short step away.
  • by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @04:58PM (#63029899) Journal

    This is exploding on youtube as we speak. There are now so many of these predator hunters that you can literally watch it 24/7.

    The biggest problem with this is that no one of them are trained professionals within medicin, psychology or anything related to treating mentally ill people, nevermind dealing with them.

    While no one of us condone the actions of luring a minor on the internet or anything involving that, it's very concerning that these youtubers are doing this without the consent of law enforcement or in any way cooperating properly with these.

    They are doing it for the views, the donations and subscriptions. They literally thrive on the mobster attitude, it's like getting the world to approve of their vigilante behavior, sometimes it turns really violent and they force the mentally ill perpetrators to do pushups, run and humiliate themselves publically. They also ruin neighborhoods by yelling and screaming at their catches and cause a genuine nuisance for the people who live there, they also completely ruin families that live there, this could have been solved in silence by law enforcement, but instead they keep them on camera for hours and often yell and scream to all the neighbors about the predator - totally destroying and humiliating the predators families and neighbors.

    If they truly intended to do it save the children, they wouldn't put on a show like this, a call to the police with the evidence is all that it would take, not hours of publically yelling and screaming and destroying neighborhoods.

    No one of these are trained medical professionals, no one of them fixes any problems - without psychological assistance and actual help for mentally ill people they don't do society any good or service. With training more predators could come forward and get help, less kids would be in danger, and we would have more healthy taxpayers instead of costing us a fortune by keeping them locked up somewhere. Sure - we all think we want to see them dead instead, right? Well - my grandmother said something wise one day when I told her I hate pedos, she said - but...what if it was your kid that become a deviant? What would you do then? Wouldn't you rather get him or her some help and guided back to a normal healthy life?

    And you know, she had a point.

    We can't allow this kind of vigilante self justice populized by these youtubers, they don't really do us any service - but it really shines some lights on just how widespread the problems are, but it still should be left to law enforcement and not vigilante justice and mob / hatred justice.

    The chats in these live catches are out of this world insane too, they're like rabid dogs that just want to see blod. God forbid if you say something sensible like talk about how to get these professional help or similar, no, then you'll be instabanned. If you tell them to calm down to save the neighborhood instead of calling every person in the neighborhood a "karen" for questioning their motives for yelling and screaming around their hoods, it is so unprofessional in every way.

  • There is a show I got into this year called Criminal UK. One of their episodes (I think from the third season) covers this basic idea: vigilantes armed with the Internet, spare time, and cameras seeking out would-be sex offenders. One of the problems with this approach, as the episode points out, is these vigilantes are not professionals, they're not trained, they don't need to follow procedures dictates by civil rights. There is no burden of proof. There is no consequence if they get it wrong. It's far t
  • Stings are just lazy, bad police work. Anytime you have to facilitate half of the crime, the other half wouldn't have happened otherwise.
  • That can be seen in most (fortunately not all) postings here. Amateurs going after crime is never a good idea. There are a number of reasons for that. One is they frequently get it wrong and there are enough cases of witch-burnings were later it was discovered that the accused was falsely accused or that the wannabe agents of "justice" had the wrong person. Then there is the little problem that in this specific scenario, they target a very minor segment of the problem and hence deviate efforts from finding

  • by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @09:12PM (#63030373)
    Actual pedophiles should be prosecuted. If the police fuck up, there is a process by which they can be held accountable. What about vigilantes? So someone gets the name wrong and targets John Smith living on Sycamore Avenue when they meant to target John Smith living on Sycamore Drive?...I hope John Smith can afford some expensive lawyers because that's the only way he can get justice and even then...will anyone ever trust him? Psychologically, we trust the acquitted less than those who have never been accused.

    If enthusiasts want to work with their local police force?...I'm all for it. I just want to ensure they have professional supervision. Cops are trained to handle this correctly. These idiots are just hyperfocused militias.

    I think the most reasonable complaint about cancel culture and MeToo is when it is misapplied and how flimsy the reasons can be. For example, a LOT of feminists think Aziz Ansari is a sleazebag. They can't identify precisely what he did, but his reputation was driven through the mud. To be honest, I've read the article a few times and can't figure out what the complaint was. I can't say he was a perfect gentlemen...definitely a bad date...but he didn't break the law or abuse power or even do anything unethical, from what I can tell...he definitely didn't deserve the press coverage he got. There are several other similar celebrities who got vague accusations from unreliable people and the mob turned on them. Most now consider Aziz Ansari to not be a bad guy...but he has sustained permanent damage to his reputation.

    View it this way: you have a choice of 2 people...like 2 equally compelling resumes. One says "acquitted of all sexual misconduct charges by mob of absolute fucking idiots"...the other says absolutely nothing about misconduct, which are you calling first? Anyone targeted by these groups are going to have news reports and social media postings about their name. When they look for a job, I am sure anyone googling their name will quickly find information about them being targeted by these nitwits.

    Mobs don't have due process. Mobs tend not carefully debate borderline cases. Mobs don't even clearly define a threshold by which you're a target or not. Mobs never say "oops, you're right, we were wrong...sorry about that." This is why we don't allow mobs...and why we should prosecute these folks HEAVILY the instant they break the law.
  • Beer for my Horses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • by bjdevil66 ( 583941 ) on Sunday November 06, 2022 @11:28PM (#63030535)

    The summary's mention about "Texas man Bill Conradt" probably should've read, "Assistant District Attorney Bill Conradt from Texas," instead.

    Including that job title adds some possibly important context to his suicide...

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