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To Catch a Predator
Hachface
Not the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered User regular
Not the Minister Farrakhan you're thinking ofDammit, Shepard!Registered User regular
Hopefully there isn't another thread on this.
Anyway, it seems that someone is suing NBC over "To Catch a Predator."
Link: http://origin.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_6445032
I don't know if the lawsuit itself has merit, but I have to say the entire concept of "To Catch a Predator" creeps me out. One of my friends loves the show and will rabidly defend it; when I voice any objection to it, she immediately springs for the "If you don't like this show, you must support sexual predators" approach, so I mostly keep my mouth shut.
Just from watching it, it seems awfully close to entrapment for my tastes, even if it's carefully outside the legal definition. Also, I would think NBC would need to get the consent of the accused in order to show their faces on television, which requires a release; since nobody wants to look like a pedophile on national TV, I can only speculate that NBC either offers them money for their consent or appearing on the show becomes a condition in their plea bargain or something like that, which squicks me out.
Even if everything is by-the-books legal, using the workings of the criminal justice system as a source of entertainment doesn't feel right to me. I hate the show "Cops" for pretty much the same reason, and "To Catch a Predator's" relentless focus on pedophilia makes the entire enterprise seem all the more lurid and sensationalist. Basically, I hate the show and everything it represents.
Your thoughts?
Anyway, it seems that someone is suing NBC over "To Catch a Predator."
San Jose Mercury News wrote:
By LARRY NEUMEISTER Associated Press Writer
Article Launched: 07/23/2007 04:55:50 PM PDT
NEW YORK—The sister of a man who was suspected of being a sexual predator and who killed himself as the cameras of "Dateline NBC" closed in on him sued NBC Universal Inc. on Monday for $105 million.
Patricia Conradt's brother, Bill Conradt Jr., shot himself last November in a Dallas suburb as police knocked at his door and a camera crew for the newsmagazine waited in the street.
Conradt claims her brother, an assistant county prosecutor, committed suicide after he was accused of engaging in a sexually explicit online chat with an adult posing as a 13-year-old boy. She alleges a police officer at the scene of the shooting told a "Dateline" producer, "That'll make good TV."
Bill Conradt, 57, became a target of a series called "To Catch a Predator" in which NBC and the activist group Perverted Justice set up shop for four days last November in a two-story home in Murphy, Texas. Perverted Justice staff posed as boys and girls online and arranged to meet men there.
Two dozen men were arrested, but the district attorney refused to prosecute any of them, saying many of the cases were tainted by the involvement of amateurs. And the city manager was fired for approving the arrangement without telling the mayor or the city council.
NBC and Perverted Justice have filmed similar operations in other cities, and the network has said the show did not have the same problems elsewhere that it produced in Murphy.
"We have not yet received the lawsuit, but we plan to defend ourselves vigorously as we believe the claims in the suit to be completely without merit," said Jenny Tartikoff, a spokeswoman for NBC Universal.
Patricia Conradt accuses NBC Universal of engaging in a pattern of racketeering activity by bribing police across the country to let it film encounters with suspects it lures to a home where it has set up cameras.
She said in the lawsuit that NBC "steamrolled" police to arrest her brother at his home after he failed to show up at the rigged house 35 miles away.
Conradt said her brother was unable to defend himself when police, NBC employees and associates swarmed his yard, creating a relationship between NBC and her brother similar to the relationship a prison guard has with an inmate.
"The suicide was reasonably foreseeable," her lawsuit reads. "At this time, the defendant wore the robe of a state official and Bill wore the shackles of a detainee. Having trespassed and invaded upon Bill's property to broadcast a spectacle to millions, the defendant took no more steps toward protecting him than are received by a gladiator or bull."
NBC was "concerned more with its own profits than with pedophilia," she said in the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in New York, where the network is based.
Link: http://origin.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_6445032
I don't know if the lawsuit itself has merit, but I have to say the entire concept of "To Catch a Predator" creeps me out. One of my friends loves the show and will rabidly defend it; when I voice any objection to it, she immediately springs for the "If you don't like this show, you must support sexual predators" approach, so I mostly keep my mouth shut.
Just from watching it, it seems awfully close to entrapment for my tastes, even if it's carefully outside the legal definition. Also, I would think NBC would need to get the consent of the accused in order to show their faces on television, which requires a release; since nobody wants to look like a pedophile on national TV, I can only speculate that NBC either offers them money for their consent or appearing on the show becomes a condition in their plea bargain or something like that, which squicks me out.
Even if everything is by-the-books legal, using the workings of the criminal justice system as a source of entertainment doesn't feel right to me. I hate the show "Cops" for pretty much the same reason, and "To Catch a Predator's" relentless focus on pedophilia makes the entire enterprise seem all the more lurid and sensationalist. Basically, I hate the show and everything it represents.
Your thoughts?
Hachface on
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the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That sounds really, really dirty to me. Yeah, pedophiles are bad, but this is nothing more than a televised witch hunt.
I'd disagree with you about Cops, though, but that's mainly because I have a crazy fascination with our criminal justice system, and watched Cops obsessively when I was a kid. It's passive observance there, rather than actively targetting and luring people out like this seems to be.
What if he didn't have anything terrible on his (beyond the chat logs they've already got?)
Plus, with that approach, you don't have the benefit of destroying the guy's character on television.
It all strikes me as one more old-media attempt to scare the masses out of the water by yelling, "shark!"
It occasionally does good things but I can't for the life of me say the intentions are good, since the utter douchebaggery of how they handle things makes it pretty clear their only intention is cashing in.
There, I said it.
Uh, oh, I guess that makes me for child molestation.
Which makes it hard to publically disagree with the show - if you do, you basically get this line.
Let the police do stings. Don't parade them on TV, it's just going to force them to go underground even more than they already have.
Also, the actual registered sex offenders that show up? Come from over an hour away? Yeah, that should prove that residence restrictions for them doesn't fucking prevent them from doing anything...
I think they could do without publicly humiliating them on TV though... Although it may make other pedophiles think twice (although it seems a few of them actually have seen the show, which makes them fucking idiots).
Also, this show teaches us that pedophiles type like 12 year old girls.
I mean, he doesn't do a goddamn thing
How OH HOW did we ever catch pedophiles before without Chris Goddamn Hansen's vital assistance.
Residence restrictions? Elaborate a wee bit for one who hasn't looked too deeply into just how horribly our justice system and society strips everyone under the 'sex offender' label of their rights and humanity.
It's very common for states to pass laws saying that registered sex offenders are barred from living or working within X distance, usually 1/2 mile, of a school, daycare center, or school bus stop.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Basically it's a bunch of feel-good laws that ban registered sex offenders from living withing x feet of a school. Recently they lengthened the distance, to the point where there is a couple of cities in Nebraska where they can't live at all because the entire damn thing fits inside all of the school's radiuses. Since it'd be political suicide to speak up against such a law, they keep getting lengthened. A lot of sex offenders had to leave Iowa and come over to Nebraska because they can't live in most of it's cities due to this.
My opinion is if these guys are supposedly this dangerous, lengthen their prison sentences. What people don't realize though is that by doing this, these guys go off the grid and we don't know where they are anymore
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Now that right there is my opinion exactly. If they can be fixed, let them out and stop making them have to announce what they were in for to the entire world. If they can't, leave them in there until they die(either naturally or artificially). One or the other.
But this conversation has been had a dozen times over.
Everyone involved in this is terrible.
And you know it shouldn't be political suicide. The rationale for opposing the law is simple: they make communities more dangerous. To stop a sex offender from reoffending, they need to be kept under a tight web of supervision. Their activities need to be monitored, they need to check in with their parole officer, their PO needs to be able to drop by their living situation at any time, and they need to follow through with a structured parole program. It's much easier for a cop to swing by an ex-con's house if that ex-con lives in the city than if that ex-con lives way out in bumfuck egypt. Call it the "short leash" effect.
If politicians played up the need for tight supervision of parolees, these laws could be dismantled on those grounds.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I'm all for getting the pedophiles out there in the system to keep them from doing things to real children, but there's a good chance that these guys could get off on technicalities and just end up pushing pedophiles deeper underground and making it harder to find them.
social murder, more like.
it's pretty horrible, and the fact that the accusation is aired on national television kind of makes it perfectly crippling, which is why this show really shouldn't be, like, allowed.
Next, we will incite people on the street to acts of violence while the police stand just out of view! Live on NBC!
Fucking hell. I mean seriously...
And as for "defending the show"...? I'm all for cracking down on this kind of crime, I think its pure evil. But to create entertainment out of it? For people to get some kind of vicarious thrill out of the subject under the guise of "justice"... Say what you like about the show's results, but there is only one reason a TV channel would do a show like this and thats money.
I've surprised myself by having a genuinely angry reaction to this.
The whole sex offender label is pretty scary....just on Digg the other day two 13 year old boys were being threatened by a district attorney with having to register as sex offenders because they smacked a girl on the butt in the hallway of their school. Apparently the kids said it was just something they did as a greeting, but it made a few girls uncomfortable (which is understandable). But instead of just having the principle put a stop to it, they bust out the sex offender registration cards and ruin some lives. It scares me particularly because at my school in 7th grade all the kids were snapping each other's bra straps and smacking each other's asses....sexual awakening manifesting in weird juvenile hallway rituals I suppose
I hope that we can someday figure out precisely what is going on with pedophiles -- physiologically and psychologically -- so that they can be helped/fixed whatever. I remember reading a story about a guy who started becoming sexually attracted to children and adolescents, and became increasingly unable to suppress his desires. Eventually he made a pass at his daughter, was arrested, and later diagnosed with a brain tumor. The tumor was removed, the behavior stopped; the tumor partially came back and the behavior started up again, that too was removed, and again the behavior ceased. I guess it just kind of illustrates that there's a lot going on up there we don't really fully understand. I imagine many are beyond saving...but it's just the whole "get the chains let's go drag the pedophile behind a truck" mentality that I find kind of unsettling. Frankly though I can't imagine, if it was to happen to my child, that I would have a reaction that differs much from said mentality...
In the state of Texas, land of Yosemite Sam, is it a distinct and separate crime to use the internet to attempt to proposition an underage person for sex, even if you do not take steps to carry out the actual sexual act. That's why the police were able to go to the guy's house to arrest him.
I'm not a fan of these type of shows because they're not solving the problem of people soliciting minors for sex on the internet, they're exploiting it for cheap laughs. You don't hear ways for parents to keep their children safe or how society can help prevent this type of behavior from occurring in the first place. All you get are oblivious idiots thinking with the wrong part of their anatomy showing up to be mocked, embarrassed and otherwise have their dignity shredded on national tv. Never mind that "innocent until proven guilty" mumbo-jumbo that gets flashed in tiny text for 2 seconds before the show starts.
Furthermore, most of the people caught on these shows are just that: idiots. The real scary sexual predators, the ones who have taken child molestation beyond the occasional hobby stage, are smart enough to avoid these type of sting operations simply because they learned how the police operate them by watching Dateline. Sting operation don't work if the target is aware that the sting is in place.
Dateline should just retire this before something really bad happens. One of these days, one of these guys is going to freak out, pull out a gun and shoot that dick Chris Hansen in the face before opening fire on everyone else in the room.
Lets not forget situations like the 19 year old guy and his 17 year old girlfriend. He got slapped with a sex offender label too.
I personally don't see an issue with the show. Hell, I think it's great. Do I like the fear-mongering that goes along with it? No, but I understand that fear mongering goes along with virtually everything that is broadcast on the news.
With that said, yes people off of this show get convicted. They've generally broken the law and are dealt with accordingly. In this particular sting, the DA declined to bring charges against anyone taken in the sting, but to me, that's playing politics.
He's black, the girl is white. SHOCK AND AWE, I TELL YA.
Shogun Streams Vidya
Just as an FYI undercover cops are not required to identify themselves when asked. Urban myth.
I host a podcast about movies.
Long story short, a 13 year old girl ran in front of his car, and he had to swerve to not kill her. He got out of his car, grabbed her by the arm, and lectured her on how to not get killed.
That's "unlawful restraint of a minor." He now has to register as a sex offender.
Streaking, as a high school prank? You now run the risk of being labeled a sex offender.
Both of these cases were in Georgia, by the way.