The busts aren’t being set up by police, they’re being set up by members of a volunteer group known as Perverted Justice who are paid by NBC and who use tactics that would be considered entrapment if the police were using them. The police claim that this gets around entrapment because they’re not the ones conducting the investigation, even though Perverted Justice are actually acting as agents for the government. Esquire did an article on it and the Wikipedia site actually references some of the criticisms and problems:

http://www.esquire.com/features/predator0907

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_catch_a_predator

I’ve got no problems with police running sting operations online to catch sex predators…more power to them. The cops are bound by the law, they’re trained to accumulate evidence so that they can effectively make their case, and they’re generally held accountable when they screw up. What I’ve got a problem with is the cops trying to do an end run around our legal protections, using proxies whose primary interest is in trying these cases in the court of public opinion for the sake of ratings and advertising dollars. If the cops feel they are unable to do their job effectively when dealing with predators, then we need a discussion over what additional powers the police should be granted and how we can tailor the law to achieve that (by re-working entrapment laws, for example). But letting our police do an end run around the system, especially at the behest of a private company who are attempting to capitalize on the situation for personal gain (their motivation certainly isn’t “public service”), because they find the legal limitations of their job inconvenient is not behavior we should tolerate from our government or police. The sex predator “epidemic” just isn’t catastrophic or widespread enough to justify giving them that much latitude.

I have to partially disagree with you on the To Catch a Predator thing based on my understanding of how they go about it. If they have undercover cops advertising on message boards that they are minors looking for sex from an adult; that would be wrong. My understanding is that these undercover cops simply pretend to be minors chatting in a chat room with everyone else and the would-be pedophiles are the ones who initiate the proposition of having sex. Once that proposition is made, the undercover cop sets up the meeting place. If I’m wrong on any of these details let me know…

I guess you could say that these tactics aren’t all that different then the prostitution busts, so maybe its not so much a question of tactics but legitimacy of the law (laws against sexual contact between consenting adults are illegitimate; laws against sexual contact between adults and minors are legitimate). While it is true that NBC does this for ratings, they are offering a valuable public service for at least 2 reasons:

1. It demonstrates to parents the dangers their children may be exposed to on the internet. Maybe some parents will think twice before allowing their children to visit a chat room unsupervised.

2. It may discourage other online predators from doing from contacting a child online. Even if the prosecutors cannot secure a conviction because of some technicality, these individuals have been exposed to viewers around the world which could include their family, their friends, their employer, organizations they may be involved with (i.e. Big Brothers/Big Sisters) etc. In this sense, this is very similar to what Jimmy Justice is doing by using shame as a weapon.

The bottom line is that if these people are actually stupid enough to set up a meeting, they deserve to be humiliated and possibly prosecuted.

As long as we’ve got stupid laws outlawing drugs and prostitution, we’re going to have vice squads who use questionable tactics. As long as it’s not textbook entrapment, I guess there’s not much to say about it. The “To Catch a Predator” thing on NBC actually bothers me more. There the cops are trying to enforce a legitimate set of laws, but they use actual entrapment to entice people to commit crimes against minors for entertainment ratings for network TV. There are so many things wrong with this on so many levels (undermining the odds of getting a conviction, private enterprise enticing the police force to go after people for entertainment value, allowing network journalists to dictate operational tactics to police officers), it’s just unbelieveable that this goes on. I hate pedophiles, but even more I hate the idea that journalists are able to go out, openly entice people to commit crimes, put themselves in the role of the court with their camera, do all this with police support, and never be held accountable. It’s abominable.

I hate Fox News, but in my opinion NBC’s standards of journalism are just as bad if not worse…if only because they’re directly manipulating our police force for their own purposes.

I don’t actually want to live in a police state, which is part of why I like what Jimmy Justice does…holding police accountable for their actions helps to prevent that. In true police states, the cops answer to no one for what they do and nobody gets to ask questions.

Kip,

The Jimmy Justice stuff’s been posted on other sites too and the general consensus from commenters seems to be that he’d score a lot more points with people if he didn’t come off as such a colossal asshole. Maybe he’s just one of those people cursed with an unpleasant personality and an annoying nasal voice and the shouting’s just so he won’t feel ignored. Or maybe the sound equipment he uses just sucks. Frankly, it doesn’t matter much to me because I think that his point is valid either way.

But I’m not sure what the shouting accomplishes.

We cannot always say the same thing for the vice squads, however (such a department should not even exist). How many times have you seen on COPS where a female police officer will pose as a prostitute? Maybe by the letter of the law it isn’t entrapment but it certainly seems like an invitation to break the law to me. What a complete waste of police resources!