Who remembers NBC’s popular true-crime-related reality TV series To Catch a Predator? Despite having stellar ratings, the show was ultimately canceled after a few seasons, but it seems that it may have inspired some individuals to go on their own hunts to track down dangerous child predators.
This video shared by Inside Edition discusses a group of individuals known as “video vigilantes,” who have taken it upon themselves to set up online sting operations to try to capture child predators.
Skeet Hansen is one of the men involved in setting up some of these vigilante sting operations, and he agreed to show the entertainment news outlet some of his video footage from one of his stings that took place in Michigan.
The footage shows a man showing up at a hotel room under the false pretense that he was meeting a 13-year-old girl for sex. When the man arrives at the hotel room and Hansen is there to have a chat, he suddenly changes his story and claims that he was told the girl was legal and 18 years old.
Skeet was inspired by To Catch a Predator’s host, American journalist Chris Hansen. He always thought it would be “pretty cool” to do what Chris did on his popular network television series.
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Things do get a little complicated, though, if you stop and think about some of the dangerous and unlawful implications behind performing these kinds of vigilante acts without the supervision of trained law authorities.
“Private citizens taking law enforcement into their own hands is a problem for our society,” policy expert Adam Scott Wandt suggests. He’s a professor of public policy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and he believes that the risk involved far outweighs any benefits.
To find out what Chris Hansen himself thinks of these “video vigilantes,” check out the full video shared by Inside Edition.
