It was inevitable, really, an online vigilante has been arrested after approaching the wrong guy. The self-proclaimed ‘creep catcher’ was trying to confront the man who he accused of luring children – he was not luring children, nor was he aware that anyone thought he was luring children – he drove dangerously and was later arrested.
The police are not fans of these vigilantes, mostly because police have to adhere to certain standards in order to arrest these same people, and their investigations are often compromised when these basement detectives try to do the same job.
The argument for the ‘creep catcher’ community is that they’re going after bad people, but so are the police. However, a video posted online of someone confronting someone else is going to be a lot less effective than actual evidence in a court of law.
The other problem is what happens when the ‘creep catchers’ catch someone who isn’t creep. This unnamed man was just some guy who was accosted by someone he didn’t know about something he didn’t know anything about. If someone in one of these videos is innocent – and innocent people are confronted in these cases all the time, as amateur detectives are not going to have the same rigorous standards of investigation – then they’re opening themselves up for a lawsuit. After all, nobody wants to be associated with luring children, especially those of us who aren’t doing that, which hopefully everyone reading these words.
I have had a passing resemblance to a person of interest in an actual police investigation several years ago – enough of a resemblance that my own mother did a double-take, in fact. Since the police were actual professionals, while they asked me a couple questions in the Tim Horton’s where they saw me, they quickly determined that I was not the guy they wanted and moved on. While it was very unnerving to find out you are the spitting image of some kind of criminal, the police did their job well and eventually caught the actual culprit. I also personally hope they made this man shave but that’s me being selfish.
I suspect that this experience would have been much different if instead of a couple of officers in uniform it was instead an angry man with a video camera trying to get me to confess to a crime I wasn’t even aware of, let alone committed. Instead of the calm conversation with professionals who know what they’re doing, it’d be with a shouting person who doesn’t really know what they should be doing. It’s going to be much more difficult to actually make your case. In fact, the standard reaction would be to get out of there quickly, and even an innocent man would flee when encountered by a shouting person with a camera – not due to guilt, but out of fear due to what they see as a raving lunatic who appears to want to harm them.
One understands the instinct to go after these ‘creeps,’ and if you do have that instinct, there’s really only one thing to do. Go join the RCMP, bumper stickers on their vehicles show that they’re recruiting all the time. Then you’re going to actually be able to do it effectively instead of ruining everyone’s day, especially the day of the people who get paid to do this regularly. And if they reject you, know that people who actually know what they’re doing think you’re not qualified and do something else.
