Real creep catching takes work, not vigilante action
I was catching up on news after some time away when I stumbled upon the story about the so-called Creep Catcher from Saskatchewan facing charges himself after allegedly harassing a person who wasn’t even his intended target.
For the uninitiated, Creep Catchers are a group of civilians who’ve taken it upon themselves to go after people they believe are online predators. They set up sting operations by posing as young teens on dating sites to lure potential culprits. Then there’s a gotcha ambush, when they arrange to meet the targets, confront them as a video camera rolls, and subsequently post the footage online to shame them.
The goal of Creep Catchers is laudable; their execution of it less so. Vigilantism is like that, even if the professed notion is to rid the world of those who would prey on vulnerable children. I’m the first person to come to the defence of children, but I also believe in the rule of law.
It’s questionable whether or not any of the group’s “evidence” would even hold up in court. Critics have also warned that Creep Catchers could be liable if their videos spur others to go after a suspected predator and mete out justice as they see fit.
In this particular incident last month in Lloydminster, Chase Brian Karnes of Marsden, Sask., is accused of confronting a man — RCMP say it was a case of mistaken identity and not even the target of the Creep Catcher’s sting — outside a Lloydminster restaurant and blocking his vehicle.
Fearing for his safety, the man being pursued hit a parked car in his effort to flee. Karnes, 22, is charged with common nuisance, criminal harassment and mischief.
Whether he’s guilty or not is for the courts and police to sort out.
And therein lies the inherent problem with Creep Catchers and others of their ilk.
They act as police, judge and jury — but without any of the education, training or law that accompanies those positions.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to spend some time with the officers trained and dedicated to investigating child exploitation online, members of the Saskatchewan Internet Child Exploitation Unit.
At the time, I was profiling some of the work they do, including their first case taking officers overseas in an investigation that reached to Qatar and Thailand. It resulted in the successful prosecution of Saskatchewan’s first “sexual tourist,” who molested a young girl in a foreign country.
These are not “gotcha” moments, but painstaking, indepth investigations that will hold up to legal scrutiny.
The same month Karnes was arrested in his ill-fated attempt at playing an investigator, officers from ICE in Saskatchewan were credited with playing a role in sending a predator to prison for decades.
In November 2015, a Saskatchewan teen who’d become the victim of an online extortion scheme turned to the RCMP for help. The 14-year-old victim thought she’d been chatting with another teenage girl on Kik Messenger, the popular smartphone messaging app. She was persuaded to exchange nude photos — only to find herself the victim of extortion.
It turns out she wasn’t chatting with another 14-year-old, but a 40-year-old Texan named Robert Dion Ables. When the investigation in this province pointed south of the border, ICE officers here got in touch with their American counterparts. A search of his property in Hutchins, Texas, last year turned up further concrete evidence of Ables’ crimes. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Ables admitted that since 2014, he’d used social media apps like Kik to contact underage girls and convince them to send nude photos of themselves. Then he coerced the girls to send more sexually explicit images by threatening to expose the girls on social media, such as Facebook. (A U.S. news report at the time of his arrest, citing police documents, said Ables claimed he’d used a similar scheme to extort money from hundreds of men as well.)
Last month in a Fort Worth, Texas courtroom, he was sentenced to 80 years in prison (unheard of in Canada, I might add) after pleading guilty to one count of receiving child pornography and two counts of producing child pornography.
The credit goes to Operation Predator, an international police initiative targeting sexual predators.
They’re the real creep catchers. The others are all just wannabes.