In 2020, the Fremont News-Messenger reported an Ohio-based group known as Dads Against Predators was admonished by law enforcement after posting three videos online, including one showing a man being confronted over why he arranged to meet a 14-year-old boy at a Fremont Walmart.
“Law enforcement officers, in coordination with prosecutors, are best able to safely apprehend suspects and to ensure that someone who has committed a crime is successfully prosecuted,” Wisconsin AG Josh Kaul said in a written statement. In 2019, after an unspecified incident involving a Wisconsin-based group known as World Wide Predator Hunters, the state’s attorney general released a statement asking private citizens not to take the law into their own hands. (The video of their confrontation was posted to Facebook and later removed, according to NBC.) In 2018, a Connecticut man died by suicide after he was confronted on camera as part of a sting by a group known as POPSquad, NBC News reported. Online predator hunting groups have multiple run-ins with law enforcement Since the show's cancellation, copycat groups have popped up across the country - and they’re not always well-received by law enforcement. The show was canceled in 2008, in part because of a sting two years prior that ended with a man's death by suicide. Perverted Justice members would run the sting, creating underage decoys and arranging to meet men in person, only for the men to be confronted by host Chris Hansen and a camera crew. Neither Schmutte nor Spain works in law enforcement - Schmutte is a welder and Spain works in electrical construction - but both had an appreciation for perhaps one of the most high-profile citizen sleuthing projects: Dateline NBC's "To Catch A Predator."įounded in 2003, online watchdog group Perverted Justice became perhaps one of the best-known examples of citizen detective groups when its work became the basis of the NBC show. How private citizens become digital detectives
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