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Thursday, May 13, 2004 | |
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Another Anti-Pedophile Vigilante Website On Patrol! 
Add the Pedophile Police to the ever-growing list of viglante websites exposing online sex predators! This seems to be a real trend, here, readers. I suppose it makes sense- online sexual predators targeting kids is one of the most repugnant of the newer Internet Age crimes. And the traditional law enforcement structures don't seem quite as good as these private web sites to tackle the problem. Not to impugn the noble efforts of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies- but the vigilante web sites seem to be doing a fantastic job of drawing these creeps out, and shining the light of public scrutiny on them- getting the info out to the communities and giving the cops probable cause and public pressure to launch investigations. The cops often critique these sites with comments like this: "We never go undercover to attract pedophiles or try to lure them," Beatty said. "You don't know if law enforcement is doing an undercover investigation itself. You could ruin six months of undercover work." You can find the latest such criticism in this write-up of a high-school teacher who was recently exposed after soliciting sex from what he thought was a 14-year old girl. Of course, now he's being investigated by the County Prosecutor, isn't he? Those pesky vigilantes, making more work for everyone! More often than not, in tracking news of this nature, what I hear is cops, communities, and school officials being given the heads up to (minimally) some damn suspicious activity of which they wouldn't have otherwise been aware. And I have yet to hear of one of these sites "ruining" any elaborate undercover work. These sites are performing a valuable service, and they're doing it for free- on a volunteer basis, pro bono, as they might say down at the Prosecutor's Office. Like the best vigilantes, these anonymous dogooders come from the community, they work within the bounds of the law- they are nonviolent, and the only punishment they deal out is increased scrutiny for a suspect, their only reward the satisfaction of having made the streets (or virtual streets) a safer place. |
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| REX STETSON: ARMCHAIR VIGILANTE character name and distinctive likeness thereof: TM & © 2003 Armchair Vigilantism, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |