The Disturbing Rise of Amateur Predator-Hunting Stings

[Nevilledog]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/the-disturbing-rise-of-amateur-predator-hunting-stings

No paywall
https://archive.ph/1noSz


A couple of years ago, when Cam, her husband, and her brother-in-law would sit around watching YouTube, a certain kind of video kept popping up. The videos, which were made by groups like Dads Against Predators, the Predator Catchers Alliance, or the Alabama Predator Poachers, tend to follow a similar template, opening with screenshots of flirty messages exchanged between an adult man and someone purporting to be a teen-age girl or boy, set to an ominous soundtrack. After some brief hesitation—Do you mind my age? Your parents won’t know?—the adult’s messages turn more explicit. The pair arranges to meet up—after school, the “teen-ager” might say, I can get my mom to drop me off. Then, the scene shifts to the fluorescent-lit aisles of a Target, or to the parking lot outside a Dollar General. The camera zeroes in on a man standing by himself, furtively checking his phone, his posture betraying anxious anticipation. The predator catchers approach, phones up, cameras already recording. “Did you come here to meet a kid?” they say loudly. The man’s face betrays what is about to happen. He denies everything, or prays to God, or buries his face in his hands, or starts yelling. The predator catchers pepper him with questions and accusations: “Why are you chatting with kids online?” “You’re a pervert, you’re nasty.” They announce that they’re going to call the police, or that they’ve already called the police. Eventually, the man walks or runs away, as his name and license-plate number flash on the screen.

The thought of adult men attempting to meet up with children got Cam’s blood boiling. And here were regular people, not cops or television journalists, actually doing something about it. Her husband and her brother-in-law were inspired. “They were, like, ‘What if we do something like this locally?’ ” Cam, who lives in Odessa, Texas, told me. (Cam asked to be referred to by a pseudonym because she fears retaliation.) “And I’m, like, ‘O.K., sure, I’ll follow.’ ”

Predator-hunter videos take an enduring social-media trend—performing stunts for clout—and add a dash of vigilante justice and participatory true crime. In the past few years, they have become a minor YouTube phenomenon, one of the platform’s proliferating subgenres that can feel ubiquitous in some parts of the online universe yet invisible in others. They typically follow the formula made famous by the TV segment “To Catch a Predator” in the early two-thousands, but with a more chaotic, D.I.Y. energy. (Earlier this year, a sting operation spiralled into a fistfight in a North Carolina Target, ending with a predator catcher shot in the leg.) The most popular examples have hundreds of thousands of views, and have inspired people to bring the trend to their own town. In 2019, NBC identified about thirty predator-catcher online groups scattered across the country; recently, the Washington Post found more than a hundred and sixty, which have been responsible for nearly a thousand stings this year.

Cam was eight years old in 2004, when “To Catch a Predator” began airing on “Dateline,” on NBC. The segment’s host, Chris Hansen, had heard about Perverted-Justice, a watchdog group whose members posed as teen-agers in chat rooms. NBC producers gave the group’s operations a prime-time makeover: renting a house and rigging it with cameras, and hiring young-looking actors to pose as decoys. (They also paid Perverted-Justice more than a hundred thousand dollars per instance.) When a man arranged a meeting with a supposed teen at the sting house, he would instead be confronted by Hansen, and by a squad of local cops ready to charge him with online solicitation of a minor, a crime punishable by between five and ten years in prison.

*snip*

[multigraincracker]

1. I never liked the tv show.

Gave me the creeps. I guess if it’s legal and it gets them off the streets it’s ok. I just don’t want to see it or read about it.

[yankee87]

2. Saw one on YouTube

It was a Christian pastor who got caught with Doritos. I like what they’re doing but I can see this going bad if people are misidentified. We’ll see how this goes.

[ColinC]

4. Your last sentence was literally an episode of arrested development...

[yankee87]

5. Didn't know that

I’ll have to look that episode up, thanks.

[exboyfil]

3. They invariably tackled the guy

Often needlessly. Granted they are scum, but such roughness leads to tackling low level offenders or even innocent individuals who just talk back.

Shows like that and Cops are horrible - little better than the public hangings. Our justice system shouldn't be a spectacle. As Maximus says "Are you not entertained?".

[Demsrule86]

6. If you show up to meet with a kid after discussing having sex with said kid , you

are scum. And if you are in a position of authority, you should be revealed. There are no innocent people going to meet these kids...they seek them out online.

[Demsrule86]

7. Many of these pedophiles will not face justice and they destroy kids.