Are the Surrey Creep Catchers unethical?
They don’t seem to care about due process, writes Craig Jones.
The Surrey Creep Catchers group claims to have snared a police officer who was actively seeking sex with a teenage girl. This may be so. But if Creep Catchers have succeeded in doing anything good in that particular case, it is only by the merest accident, because there is little indication from their online posts that they care whether the people they target are criminals at all.
Consider the case of Steve, who responded to an innocuous Craigslist ad from “Sara.” In the course of their brief conversation during a single afternoon, “Sara” and Steve agreed to meet for coffee. At some point she writes “I’m 15 if you’re OK with that let’s chill.” Steve, probably thinking that there’s no tactful way to back out from a platonic coffee date just because she’s younger than he expected, responds that “if you’re into doing art and going on bike rides then yeah, I’m OK with your age.”
There is no — absolutely no — talk about sex or any other form of intimacy in their brief conversation. No luring, no exploitation. No suggestion that Steve had anything in mind except a cup of coffee and a bike ride with a likeminded companion. The sexual element seems to have sprung whole cloth from the fevered imagination of the Catchers themselves.
Of course, when Steve showed up to the coffee shop later that day, the catcher creeps slithered up and did their thing, revelling in how terrified Steve appears to be. All part of the show. Then they posted the video, along with Steve’s name and phone number, online (the Kelowna offshoot group Creep Hunters also published the email address and phone number of at least one of their targets). This is serious. In other jurisdictions, identification of “creeps” — real and imagined — has led to murder and suicide. Cue the Creep Catchers’ theme music (I’m not making this up): “Boom! Yer done, bro.”
Let’s pause for a minute and state the obvious. There is nothing illegal, and (given the absence of any evidence of malicious intent) nothing even improper, about Steve’s agreeing to an afternoon request by a 15-year-old to meet for coffee. Might be odd, sure. But “odd” shouldn’t get your life ruined, or worse.
And Steve isn’t an isolated innocent. Global News documented the story of a mentally deficient 28-year-old man in Kelowna. “John” suffers from fetal alcohol syndrome and schizophrenia, and reportedly has the mental capacity of a 12-year-old. Again, posing as an adolescent girl, the catcher creeps persuade “John” to meet with their “decoy.” They blunder into his life, and as described by John’s horrified social worker, set about destroying it. In the Global story, the woman who worked on luring “John” conceded that he had not actually sought sex with her “per se,” as if that were an aside, a minor and untroubling detail. Boom, yer done.
There are many other legal issues here, as yet unexplored. But the main point is that we have trained, educated and skilled police officers for a reason. We have public oversight and accountability for their investigations for a reason. We have laws, and protections for the accused, for a reason. And that reason is to avoid precisely what is happening here.
The Creep Catchers’ websites are all testosterone, jutting jaws and white-guy hip-hop posturing. Make no mistake, this is all about the catchers, not the creeps. Like wannabe reality-TV stars, they strike poses for photos and flog branded T-shirts. It’s all kind of … creepy.
And you’ll quickly notice that spelling and grammar are not among the Catchers’ superhero skills; their text reads like it was drafted by one of their imaginary teenage victims, replete with childish errors and random capitalization.
Perhaps it’s not fair to expect people who appear flummoxed by simple rules of punctuation to understand the presumption of innocence, but we shouldn’t provide them with the audience they so desperately crave.
Perhaps it’s not fair to expect people who appear flummoxed by simple rules of punctuation to understand the presumption of innocence, but we shouldn’t provide them with the audience they so desperately crave.