Do the police approve of 'paedo hunter' groups?

[lavenderscenteddrawerliners]

Perhaps approve is the wrong word, but do the police appreciate the work of these groups? Would they rather they didn't act as decoys or 'stingers'? I'm asking as I saw a live on Facebook where a hunter group went to the house of a man who had been online grooming a young teen. The police came, man was taken away. The main hunter guy said something along the lines of "the police work very well with us" and it made me wonder do the police think these hunters are doing a good job?

A lot of the men in these groups are paedophiles themselves - a case of being overly vocal to detract from what they’re doing.

It’s a bit like the amount of church pastors and such who are so blatantly homophobic and who later come out as gay, except in the case of the paedo hunters it’s obv a lot more sinister.

Most of them have form for violence in other areas though.

Pretty much every social media site pays for video views. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram. Their videos will earn them £££

that’s their motivation

No they are a nightmare for a case.
I don’t think people in general realise how much goes into a conviction. Often, these vigilante groups make a conviction harder.

not to mention if they get it wrong. I remember reading a guy committed suicide after being accused and his face smeared all over Facebook. Turns out he was completely innocent.

You also have to consider that anyone who essentially gets a kick out of pretending to be a child to get some pervert to talk sex to them is bloody perverted in their own right, even if they’re allegedly doing it for good.

The police have special target forces for this stuff, they’re very specifically trained and supervised and receive therapy to deal with the conversations they’re having. These blokes off the street have none of that, they just log on to the net and start engaging. No training, no awareness, just the kick they get out of playing an under age kid to be talked to by a paedo. Fucking depraved.

Good luck finding social housing anywhere in the UK where there are next to no children.

Always bemuses me when the pitchfork and torch-wielding mob turn up to harass a tenant over a previous conviction. These are the ones people know about, the ones being monitored. The more pertinent threat are the ones who haven't yet been caught.

So eventually the morons succeed in having their target hounded out of the area, the problem is, this doesn't absolve the LA of their obligation to provide housing, so they get re-homed in the next town along, and the entire thing begins over. You've forced a known offender out of your locale, but all you've done is made them someone else's problem, likely where they are less well known by the locals, and therefore even more likely to gain access to vulnerable children. Round of applause for the halfwits.

My postcode has the highest concentration of people on the Sex Offenders Register of any in my city. The place is still teeming with kids playing in the streets though. I'd be more concerned about kids safety in the other parts because I suspect the reality is that more affluent men are just better at hiding their predilections, avoiding detection, and it's a fact that more affluent people are treated more leniently by the justice system, less prone to having their convictions publicised on SM etc.

I suspect the same. A lot of the men involved in our local 'protect our women and girls' patrol have been exposed as nonces or domestic abusers.

So person goes free to rape another child. That's a wow from me on our utterly not fit for purpose justice system.

But it's not a justification to keep targeting the same property again and again in a very dangerous manner and keep endangering everybody living around that property! If anybody living in the surrounding properties has a mortgage, they lose the value of their house because thugs keep targeting the area! You don't whether the paedophile has moved or died and they are very likely to move on so it's thick and selfish to keep the targeting the property!

It's not that straightforward, you don't know if a teacher for example has an issue with a kids parent and tries to lead kid into saying something incriminating about that adult then it could be a false allegation, especially as in the case mentioned the child said totally different version events to the police. You have to very careful about false allegations and especially for something like this.

There was a situation on the local community Facebook group where I live recently where somebody posting anonymously out a photograph up and name of what turned out to be a young, vulnerable guy with learning disabilities and they accused him of taking to a young girl online - no evidence, no screenshots, no detail and yet they out this guy and his family and neighbours at enormous risk! People who knew they the guy said he was a very gentle guy who isn't capable of doing anything like that,they asked for evidence, they asked why this was going on Facebook instead of the police if it was true! That behaviour is dangerous and unacceptable and there should be consequences for posting things like that online!

No.

Police and law procedures have to be followed to the letter, to gain a conviction. There was a notorious group called “letzgohunting”. And also, we do not want to encourage “mob justice”, and trial by social media. There was enough of that in 2020.

‘Only in America’

In U.K. this would probably be classed as entrapment

I agree.

It was the same for all the “protect our women” protests outside migrant hotels I believe. Much higher rates of DV convictions than the general population. Completely unsurprising. I (a white woman) wouldn’t have felt particularly safe and protected walking through a group of those men.

No. We have police in the format they are for a reason. They are accountable. They are trained. They have to work in line with the law which governs their behaviour. When caught flouting it they can be sacked, jailed etc.

Local vigilantes have no accountability. No such laws they work to. There have been cases of people being murdered, burned etc due to mistaken identity. By people who think they know best. But who are looking to lynch someone. Anyone usually who is a bit different in some way.

Everybody working with children has safeguarding training where they're told if a disclosure is made, not ask any questions and they immediately report it so the people trained in interviewing the child can do so.

It's not that our justice system isn't fit for purpose, it's that people are supposed to leave the investigation to the people trained to do so or otherwise potentially jeopardise it.

People, especially children are really easy to confuse and influence. people, especially children also like to please, do what they think the person wants or may just want the person want to stop asking so tell them what they think they want to hear. If a do-gooder has gone steaming in asking a lot of questions it immediately throws an investigation into question, especially if the victim does not then repeat the same things to the people actually trained to take a statement.

No they don't. They can jeopardise cases and make mistaken identities.

I think the police sometimes take them away from the mob for their own safety.

It appears that this is what has happened, because the man who "was arrested" was back at home the next morning.

No I can imagine the police are already often aware and trying to build a case and the hunters come along and tread all over it plus visually showing the world. When they get it wrong it is so damaging.

Yep no chance of a fair trial when he’s already been declared guilty on a live stream and been sentenced by the mob. That and any admission is clearly coerced. Plus as I said they’re nearly always lacking some sort of capacity and they bully them into agreeing, no lawyer present, no appropriate adult.

any half decent solicitor could argue that one.

if they didn’t live stream it would have a better chance in court, but then no money and hero worship. Which is what it’s really about.

but then they change the narrative and start saying it’s so people “know” who the paedophile is because, again, the police won’t do anything to “keep are kids safe”

They always strike me as the types who love a flag

Just saw on their FB page they have an egg timer emoji thing with a count down to their next door call. The people in the comments are salivating at this. There must be a huge element of weird gratification in this for the spectators fans.

Yes the one I'm looking at is interspersed with Stop the Boats and Keep Britain Great AI images along with flag banners. I don't think this is about crime prevention or keeping people safe, it's entertainment.

And the money making element hadn't occurred to me, but would probably explain the requests for likes/shares/follows.

I don’t think they do - I’m not sure what the groups would mean by the police “works so well with us”
if it is a “first offence” for the person I’m not sure how much useful evidence would be obtained
The police may be there to prevent a breach of the peace