'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.)
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.)
There's nothing disturbing about this (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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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].
Re: There's nothing disturbing about this (Score:2)
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
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That goes against Blackstone's Ratio [wikipedia.org].
However, they made us try to breathe through soggy masks for two years. So I know where our government's sentiments lie.
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I wore my mask over both mouth and nose.
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Under terms of logic, they would also harm a number of innocent people. Possibly more innocent people than they would ultimately save.
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All torture will get you is a false confession.
You know this, but advocate for it anyway. Sick people like you need to be locked up.
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It would increase convictions but that's because people will confess to things they didn't do to get away from a torture situation.
Sadism with a Halo (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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?"
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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.
People are tired of failure (Score:2)
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
Theres no difference (Score:5, Insightful)
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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
It isn't, and the police had the integrity to tell them that in this case.
Re: Theres no difference (Score:2)
What worries me about this (Score:5, Insightful)
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The dangers of self justice vigilante groups (Score:3)
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.
Criminal UK episode (Score:2)
All stings should be illegal (Score:2)
An impressive amount of dumb virtue signalling (Score:2)
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
It's the worst of "cancel culture" (Score:3)
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 (Score:2)
Beer for my Horses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Important detail about "Texas man Bill Conradt" (Score:3)
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...
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
America doesn't incarcerate enough people so clearly we need vigilantes.
I believe in due process, the rule of law and the presumption of innocence. Maybe of the police in America spent less time doing army cosplay (and doing a lot of social duties which have been defunded) and more time on policing, they might have time to prevent crime.
But I'm a radical lefty so it's not really surprising I'm pro law and order.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:4, Interesting)
You're a moderate but there's a lot of money being spent to convince you and others that moderate positions are radical positions. Remember being conservative means being cautious. Not being right wing. The right wing have appropriated the word conservative because they are radicals and they don't want other people realizing that they're radicals
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:4, Insightful)
Actual radical lefties want to completely do away with police and replace it entirely with community organizations.
That depends on the type of radical lefty. Socialists want to keep the state, including the police, they just want to stop the state enforcing the relation of capital, and hence change the police from an organisation whose primary purpose is to enforce capital into an organisation just for protecting people. It's specifically anarchists who want to do away with the state and with police altogether.
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> Actual radical lefties want to completely do away with police and replace it entirely with community organizations.
No, that's a right-wing notjob's idea of what actual radical lefties want. Right up there with the One World Eebil Socialist Government.
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I mean, it doesn't even work on the surface. I mean, if they did away with the police, who's going to drag all the right-thinking, god-fearing, honest-to-goodness patriots off to the re-education camps?
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Honestly you're not even close to being a radical lefty.
I know. I was replying to SuperKendall. Anyone slightly to the left of everyone's favourite moustachioed dictator is "radical left" according to him.
Actual radical lefties want to completely do away with police and replace it entirely with community organizations.
Depends on the lefty. That wasn't part of Jeremy Corbyn's platform, for example.
The right wing have appropriated the word conservative because they are radicals and they don't want other peopl
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:4, Funny)
I mean as long as we're just stringing together nonsense I thought I'd join in the fun.
Re: Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
The trouble with that attitude is that you end up trashing the rights of anyone you know is a pedo, then your "enthusiasm" allows you to move to people you suspect are pedos, and then when the blood and righteous wrath has grown out of control you will start burning people who aren't pedos but who you don't like.
Then one day you wake up and your city has become Salem.
Re: Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Informative)
Then one day you wake up and your city has become Salem.
You don't need to go back to the 1600s for an example of a moral panic run amuck. The Satanic Ritual Abuse Scandal [wikipedia.org] was in the 1980s.
During the SRAS, thousands of accusations were made, hundreds of people had their careers and families destroyed, and some spent years in jail awaiting trial.
It now appears that this many accusations were true: 0.
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Just call it the Satanic Panic like the wiki article and literally everyone else does.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you know who is a pedo or not? Are we back to the witch-hunting days where you can just accuse Goody Hobbs of doing bad things and she ends up being hanged? We've had modern cases of hysteria over this, the belief in preschool and Sunday-school satanic rituals that destroyed the careers and lives of innocent people. Or someone just accuses a politician of having a pedo ring in the non-existent basement below a pizza parlor. You have some nuts out there who probably believe that it's better to accuse some innocents than to let one pedo go free, making it acceptable to ignore their rights once someone is accused. Spreading the idea that pedos are everywhere and extremely common just encourages false accusations.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
These vigilantes are absolutely modern day witch hunters. Doubtless they nail down actual pedophiles, but because they aren't bound by any notion of due process at all, they're going to take out an innocent person who happened to be in the wrong place (physically or virtually) and cause real harm. And then what? They get sued? These arseholes probably aren't worth enough for a civil action. The innocent person commits suicide, as happened even with police investigations like Project Ore in the UK.
There's a reason vigilantism is frowned on, and when it crosses the line, leads to criminal sanction. Dealing with shitty cops is bad enough, dealing with self-righteous civilians is even worse.
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Everyone should and -does- have rights. It's why they're called rights and not privileges.
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Just go to Gab already. They have a tech section and everything, you'll be right at home.
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The only one constantly repeating GOP talking points and attacking blue states is you, buddy.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
The moment you act without certainty, you become the bad guy.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
"The moment you act without certainty, you become the bad guy."
Having a badge provides cover, not certainty.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
"The moment you act without certainty, you become the bad guy."
Having a badge provides cover, not certainty.
Which is why we have a court system and trials. They are the ones who try to determine certainty (or at least beyond a reasonable doubt).
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But that goes against frontier justice. You can't make the righteous self-reflect. That's unreasonable. The ends justify the means.
"It is better 100 innocent persons should be ruined, than that one guilty person go free, is a maxim that has been long and generally approved" - Benjamin Franklin
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have evidence that someone is involved in child sex trafficking or producing or dealing in child pornography, contact law enforcement. Of law enforcement is doing a shit job, there's a political process to fix that as well.
Starting a vigilante group rarely goes well. Maybe it doesn't run into any problems at first, but it'll eventually attract the sort of person who gets a thrill from enacting their brand of justice with very little concern if someone's rights are trampled in the process or in the extreme cases whether someone being accused is actually guilty in the first place.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should a pedophile have any rights?
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
Fascists absolutely love dehumanizing people. That lets them justify all sorts of horrific atrocities.
Sure, sounds good stripping pedos fo their rights until you realize that the definition of pedo is going to expand until it encompasses everyone that the fascists don't like. LGBT will probably be the first group to be labeled pedo. A lot of right-wingers already think they're pedos. After that, I image that they'll find ways to apply that label to anyone they don't like.
No one thinks they'll be in the out group until it happens to them. Unless you're a billionaire towing the party line, you will eventually be in the out group.
That's why the law needs to applied equally to all and why we need to carefully guard against dehumanizing anyone, regardless of how vile and disgusting we personally believe them to be.
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No one thinks they'll be in the out group until it happens to them.
Indeed, how quickly people forget.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]...
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If people are forced to take the law into their own hands like this, it's an indication that government is or has failed horribly. Historically this may have been done by peopl
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What separates man from the animals is our ability to rise above our base nature. That's the power of reason. You don't get to justify your shitty behavior with an appeal to "human nature".
Anyone who just tosses up their hands and says "well, that's just human nature, there's nothing we can do" is either really stupid or really awful.
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First you have to prove beyond a reasonably doubt they are a pedophile. Then we can discuss what rights a *convicted* pedophile should or shouldn't have. Otherwise, I could just walk up to you one day, point at you and shout "That guy is a pedophile", and the mob decides you have no rights, and beats you to death.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really not so different than certain other parts of the world where you can just accuse someone you don't like of mistreating a holy book or something else considered sacrilegious in order to get a whipped up mob to bring them to "justice", so when you ask me how does that work, I can only respond that it works all too easily. We even have it here in the U.S. with people calling the police pretending to be a hostage at such and such address. It's usually referred to as swatting and it's gotten several innocent people killed.
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Meh, that's too much work. Just send some sexy messages to one of these vigilantes and mention that you like posting on Slashdot, nickname is quonset, look me up. Let them do the hunting down.
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Deciding he rather didn't like quonset, Alvin trawled through his post history long enough to discover his actual identity and after sufficient time his address and other personal details. One evening Alvin impersonated quonset in an online chat with a group of vigilantes pretending to be a group prostituting underage children and agreed to arrange an encounter later that week at quonset's house. Of course quonset acted like he had no idea what the group of pedo-busters were doing at his house and denied having ever spoken with them in any kind of online chat, and some would say he even appeared rather convincing. Even though some of his neighbors and friends claimed that they believed him and that he never would do anything like that, there was always that little bit of doubt gnawing at the back of their mind.
Alvin forgot to mail pictures of little children to quonset, it doesn't even need to be child porn, just pictures of pretty boys or girls will do. The mob finding that in quonset's mailbox would be enough to bring the pitchforks.
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The evidence these groups hand the cops is useless when it comes to a trial. The cops would have to do the same sting all over again.
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How does that work? You don't engage in online chats with someone you believe to be underage?
Someone else does and they use a fake identity. A vigilante who swears she is 'really good' at figuring out their real ID gets it wrong and you find yourself in the cross-hairs.
Then people like you have no sympathy because clearly you wouldn't be in the cross-hairs if you weren't a predator.
The police may be just lazy, or they fear getting their asses sued off if they pursue bad leads to someone with lots of money.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophile (Score:2)
How does that work? You don't engage in online chats with someone you believe to be underage?
How do you know who someone is? There’s a famous comic about how on the Internet no one knows you’re not a dog. If all you’re armed with are some chat logs, you may know that there’s a creep, but that’s a far cry from positively identifying the person who got out of his vehicle just now as the one. For all you know, someone doesn’t like him but knows he goes to that park every day for a break, so they posed as him and set up the meet there. Or maybe it’s pure happen
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How does that work? You don't engage in online chats with someone you believe to be underage?
Many predators pretend to be underage themselves as a way of getting close to their victims. If you're trying to trap predators, then you are likely to engage in online chats with someone *claiming* to be underage.
How is a vigilante going to identify that the person they're talking to is a predator pretending to be underage and not someone who genuinely is underage?
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The kind of sick bastard who knows the US justice system is completely nuts and if some amateurs get these people on camera, it may well be that for some stupid technicality they have to go free while at the same time a professional sting op that was about to catch the bastard goes away empty handed.
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What kind of sick bastard finds anything at all wrong with hunting down people who solicit VERY underaged girls and boys for sex?
"Wrong" or not, it's an incredibly bad idea. Fundamentally, it s a form of vigilantism, which tends to be fueled by very good intentions but in practice can easily lead to disaster.
As example, law enforcement has legal protections while conducting an investigation, but a normal citizen does not. It takes only one mistake leading to outing as "predator" the wrong person to get said person potentially ruined, not to mention getting at the wrong end of a potentially life-altering lawsuit, if not criminal prose
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Of course most of us civilized folks see and serial predator or trafficker of minors as doing great irredeemable harm and the goal has to be removing them from free society, either in jail
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Now the distraction is per
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"And too many men in drag turn out to be pedophiles to ignore"
[Citation needed]
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AND every single "Drag Queen with Kids" event. I fully support sex workers and feel like adults should be free to do what they want, with who they want, at whatever rate they want. But kids are off limits because they cannot protect themselves and don't even really know what is wrong.
If you think a guy in drag reading to kids is sexualizing them, it mostly means you find men in drag sexy.
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What kind of sick bastard finds anything at all wrong with hunting down people who solicit VERY underaged girls and boys for sex?
It isn't so much whether pedos should be caught and prosecuted, but whether people with no background in law or law enforcement should be taking matters into their own hands. Kind of like George Zimmerman putting a gun in his pocket and walking around neighborhoods at night. Everyone thinks burglars should be caught but that wasn't a good way to catch them.
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The problem happens when they get it wrong. Perhaps very wrong. Even in the summary it spoke of tracking down a predator's real identity. What happen if they find the wrong person and paint them with a target that will never wash off?
If we could count on the hunters getting it right 100% of the time with no room for doubt it would be another matter, but we can't.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of sick bastard finds anything at all wrong with hunting down people who solicit VERY underaged girls and boys for sex?
there's the police for that. incompetent as police might be, i still don't think it's a good idea to have mobs of ordinary citizens running amok with superman complex and no accountability. you might think that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, and you would be dead wrong about that, mistakes can and do happen, and that's precisely why in a civilized society crime is supposed to be dealt with with due process. and i'm first at criticizing police incompetence or corruption, but the last thing i want is amateur lynch parties around.
also, there is a fine line between protecting children, prosecuting crime and putting up a morbid show. i find it also questionable that this manhunt becomes a common attraction in themselves.
and you may have overlooked in tfa: most child sex abuse comes from people in the child's own private circle. your vigilantes aren't even fishing in the correct pond, but that doesn't seem to bother them. maybe the audience doesn't care either.
see, it's not bastardry, just there are very serious, rational concerns about the whole thing, if you think just a bit.
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ordinary citizens running amok with superman complex and no accountability.
Oh, but they do have accountability. They may think they don't, but if they commit one crime, then the heavy hand of the law can come down on them. There is no qualified immunity for vigilantes.
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While "Taking a predator into custody can be very dangerous as well." might just be the most ridiculously horrible thing I have ever heard a police officer say, their is some argument to be made here.
Does making a predator lose their job actually reduce the number of crimes? Real predators should be in jail or dead, public shaming may be ineffective or even counter at least for the person getting shamed. I also would be worried about solicitation. Simply pretending to be underage online is not entrapment, b
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Evidently chain (Score:2)
How do vigilantes expect court cases to go when there is no evidence chain?
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Our society designates certain people to enforce laws. They get certain special rights and protections in case they screw up in the line of duty. We call these people “co
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What kind of sick bastard
The kind that thinks the police should be doing this job. With their (supposed) expertise in collecting evidence and building prosecutable court cases. Which they seem to do in most cases until it's the mayor's nephew. Then they are all tripping over their shoelaces like clumsy fuckwits.
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What kind of sick bastard finds anything at all wrong with hunting down people who solicit VERY underaged girls and boys for sex?
Here one infamous group accosted someone they accused of it. When they asked him why he was wanting to meet a girl aged 13 he replied because he was 14. They didn't believe him even though it was clear he was a young kid. They physically restrained him, started asking all kinds of questions and demanding answers, still not believing them even when he produced his phone and said to call his mom. Only when one of the more sensible morons in the group started to see the light did they change tack, doing a comp
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So you're saying a bunch of people who like to pretend they're kids and talk sexy on the Internet lured an actual kid to a meeting then assaulted him?
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So you're saying a bunch of people who like to pretend they're kids and talk sexy on the Internet lured an actual kid to a meeting then assaulted him?
Seems completely plausible to me.
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What kind of sick bastard finds anything at all wrong with hunting down people who solicit VERY underaged girls and boys for sex?
So you're saying that you're okay with pedos as long as the kids they solicit are only a little underage? You're one sick piece of shit.
I'm guessing you're one of those libertarians that think there shouldn't any age of consent. We have a name for freaks like you.
Re:Nothing wrong with outing pedophiles (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of sick bastard finds anything at all wrong with hunting down people who solicit VERY underaged girls and boys for sex?
There’s nothing wrong with hunting pedophiles, but how quickly we forget why it’s oftentimes not a good idea to let the amateurs do this sort of thing.
Like that time the Internet went after an innocent cyclist because they wrongly thought he had attacked kids? Spoiler: it wasn’t him.
https://nymag.com/intelligence... [nymag.com]
Or the Internet sleuths who got it very wrong in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing:
https://www.bbc.com/news/techn... [bbc.com]
https://www.theatlantic.com/te... [theatlantic.com]
Or that time a group of vigilantes went after and killed an innocent man who was falsely accused of being a pedophile?
https://7news.com.au/news/crim... [7news.com.au]
Or that time an innocent jogger was killed by vigilantes because he was black and happened to be in an area where there had recently been some crimes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Or that time time a man lost a few years of his life for a rape accusation that was eventually proven false?
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/u... [cosmopolitan.com]
The common thread in all of these, and more, is that the justice system—while far from perfect—does a decent job at sorting fact from emotional gut feelings. The rape accusation? Charges dropped once previously withheld evidence came to light. The falsely accused cyclist? Immediately excluded as a suspect once he talked to the cops. Boston Marathon bombing? Investigators found the perpetrators without the mob’s help. The people who didn’t get justice are the ones who were “dealt with” outside the law.
If you want to help the police, fine, but hand things over to them, not just for your own sake, but for the sake of your potential victims as well, because we all make mistakes, every one of us. For all the valid complaints we have about police, at least there’s a court system behind them to validate anything they claim and catch their mistakes. Vigilantes are the heroes of their own story who have the hubris to think they can be a fair judge, jury, and executioner.
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Because they're vigilantes! They don't know what they're doing, they don't understand chain of custody for evidence, they don't know if their target has ever acted on pedophilia feelings or not, or even if they actually got the right guy, or if they guy believed that the fake online identity was underage, are they engaging in entrapment, etc. Vigilantism creates its own problems.
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Well pretending to be a minor online in order to solicit others is often the behaviour of the predators themselves...
I had a friend who many years ago talked with a "14 year old girl" online and arranged to meet her, only to find it was a cop. He was also 14 at the time, so he became the victim of a poorly thought out sting operation.
Now imagine if it's a vigilante instead of a cop, what checks and balances are in place to ensure that the target is who you think they are? What's to stop someone claiming to
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There's nothing wrong, but it is pretty dangerous and legally exploitable.
So you need to be very careful and probably work with the law enforcement if possible, so you have both physical protection AND a "legally reliable" testimony.
Re:They're outing themselves (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Remember the fad of "suppressed memories" of sex crimes with respect to kids back in the 90's? It turned to be bullshit as well. But hey, maybe one of those vigilantes will finger you for something, they aren't particularly concerned with the actual facts.
Soon, this will turn into a Catch-a-Predator For Hire scam. You too can have someone you don't like fingered with the worst kind of publicity regardless of whether it is accurate. The right-wing nuts have shown they cannot discern truth from fantasy.
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But hey, maybe one of those vigilantes will finger you for something, they aren't particularly concerned with the actual facts.
Can you support that claim? TFS didn't mention any cases where the vigilantes got something wrong.
Re: They're outing themselves (Score:2)
Given these are group efforts the amount of money to be recouped would be enough for a pro-bono lawyer. Assuming, of course, that the accusations were false.
Re:Video and audio evidence r (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's pretty cut and dried when a pedo solicits a minor and their acts are recorded."
Maybe... but very shortly I'll be able to manufacturer "recordings" implicating anybody I choose. Everybody who doesn't want to become a known pedophile better be really nice to me.
Re:Video and audio evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty cut and dried when a pedo solicits a minor
Except it is not so cut and dried. Sometimes innocent conversation really is innocent conversation. Sometimes "dirty" chatting doesn't go beyond chatting. Sometimes someone with no prior intent can be lured into a conversation by a vigilante skilled at entrapment. Sometimes the solicitor isn't using his own account, and the vigilantism hits the wrong person.
If this was just gathering evidence and turning it over to the police, it would be acceptable. But they are going far beyond that. They are destroying people's families, getting them fired, and doxxing them to their friends, all without any due process or any ability of the accused to challenge the evidence.
Even if the accusations are true, do you believe that destroying a pedo's family and career will "reform" him?
How is that different from recording dirty cops
Because mere accusations are not enough to destroy the life of a dirty cop. You need solid evidence, and even then, the cop can just get a different job.
Re: Since you asked (Score:2)
Not just America, England also used posses in the past. A posse was always commanded and led by an actual government agent. The posse were just extra bodies for doing things like searches of large open areas in the west where you need a lot of bodies to actually find anything, or for arrests of dangerous people.
The posse is acting as an agent of the government, so it's still the government using the violence.
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Now, the Libertarian platform otoh, is still trying to repeal the age of consent. https://www.newsweek.com/arizo... [newsweek.com]
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Ya, there has also been a disturbing rise in pink unicorns going around spearing right-wingnuts. And alien abductions have been occurring right and left in red states, all attributable to aliens sneaking across the border in human suits trying to act like they are one of us. Hey, it's fun making shit up. Please post some more.
Re: 'The Disturbing Rise of.... (Score:3, Funny)
Nobody wants to fuck you either.
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If you can only feel empathy for a subset of innocent humans, you deserve zero empathy yourself.
you might have to think that through again, because i don't think you are saying what you think you are saying.
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Adults have zero business interacting with minors online
Soo, if somebody asks a question about internet security on some forum or mailing-list, I have to make sure it is not a minor before I answer? And, come to think of it, what about answering to a posting here on /.? What if a minor posts anything here? And you _also_ seem to have forgotten that most sexual assault on kids is _not_ arranged online at all. In fact it will be parents, siblings, relatives and, quite often, priests.
I think you have switched off your brain somewhere in there, because that idea is
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Adults have zero business interacting with minors online let alone forming relationships. The cure is death
Agrh!! Are you deliberately summoning Poe's law there?
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I think everyone wants to see justice for what Epstein did. But there's nothing we can do about it.