Who is the real creep?

Ryan LaForge of Surrey, B.C., got an RCMP cop arrested and charged with child luring and breach of trust.

David Swanson of Swift Current, Sask., got himself, and his target, arrested.

And John Doep, well, by the standards this lot share, he may be the current champ, in that his outing of a mentally ill, transgendered woman named Katelynn Ariel McKnight ( formerly Joe Dunn) may have played a role in her suicide last month.

Doep is the president of the Edmonton chapter of Creep Catcher, a national network of what appears to be a collection of thuggish white, heavily tattooed men.

They are self- appointed sheriffs, in that they prowl the web posing as underage girls or boys, engaging grown men in steamy chats and, they hope, in an eventual videoed “meet,” many of which consist mostly of the hunter shrieking “Pedo! Pedo!” and “What the f-- k do you have to say for yourself ?” as they chase down or publicly shame alleged pedophiles.

One never knows, of course, about suicide. In my observation, it often isn’t a straight line from A to B, and five months passed from the time the McKnight video was posted (drawing hundreds of thousands of views) and McKnight taking her own life.

But it’s a given that being confronted on the porch of her Edmonton house last April by Doep and his camera, and then being shamed online, didn’t help.

The video — still available online, and though Creep Catcher Canada says it has taken its copies down, it’s there at all only because of the group — is excruciating.

First comes the requisite Creep Catcher opening shot, of Doep’s shoes and legs as he walks toward the house, the camera presumably hidden or at least discreetly held. He asks if “Katelynn” is home and says, “Can you ask him to come out please.” ( Note the refusal to use the feminine pronoun. Big cruelties, small ones, they do it all.) Doep then babbles on about her wanting to meet a “14-year-old little girl,” and says he has the online chats to prove it.

McKnight doesn’t look shocked as much as bewildered. Practically her first words are that her phone was stolen four days before, and as Doep prattles on, his voice rising, she says, “May I ask what you’re talking about?”

He accuses her of saying she wanted to have “shower sex” with him when she believed he was the “14- yearold little girl.” She says again her phone was stolen. She protests that she was sexually exploited as a child and says, “I can’t believe you would accuse me of this.”

At one point, she asks him to turn off the camera; he says he is, but keeps it running. She asks if he has a cigarette. She tells him she just got out of hospital after a suicide attempt.

“I am not a pedophile,” she says.

“I’m not accusing you of that,” Doep says inexplicably, given why he’s there and what he’s already said, and adds, “I’m here to listen.”

McKnight then says, with tremendous grace, “I want to hit you, but I’m holding back,” and Doep cries triumphantly that he’s turning the camera back on ( the one he never turned off ) for his own safety. “Now you’re threatening my life!” he says, righteous and wounded.

Like his brethren in more than two dozen other Canadian cities, Doep is not trained. He has no expertise in investigation, least of all in child exploitation and sexual assault. Even if McKnight had not taken her own life and had confessed to being the worst sexual predator in the world, his video would have been properly useless to police.

Whatever any of Creep Catcher’s “catches” admit, these admissions were obtained by coercion and intimidation.

On t he various social media sites these folks use, and in t heir occasional mainstream media interviews, the inevitable claim is they are either helping police or filling a gap the police are ignoring.

That simply isn’ t true: Child exploitation crimes are a growth area, thanks to the web. And Canadian police forces are good at this work ( Toronto’s team, for instance, has a top- notch reputation around the world). And 95 per cent of crimes against children aren’t committed by strangers. Rather, the perpetrators tend to be family and friends of the child, those in a position of trust and authority and access.

Creep Catchers are chasing the few, and they’re at least as creepy as those they chase. Nobody chooses to be a pedophile, but they chose to do this.