More seldom than you’d think – as a public defender, I was more likely to find the lowest of the low, so to speak – not the bottom rung of the gang, but the guys that couldn’t even cut it in the gang in the first place. Much of my line of work was getting the bet deal for my guy because he dealt first, not because he could serve up a bigger fish. Not to say it didn’t happen, but in general… no. But I take your meaning, certainly.
No argument there.
But then… what you say applies to all criminal activity. The guy clueless enough to sell a dime bag to the undercover cop is caught much easier, and more frequently, than the guy selling six kilos of finest Columbian flake. The street hooker dumb enough to climb in the undercover officer’s car and make a deal gets arrested much more often than the Heidi Fleiss courtesan. The crack addict shoplifting from Walmart gets nabbed with greater ease than the international jewel thief.
That’s the reality of law enforcement. This doesn’t mean we should ignore the international jewel thieves, of course, but neither can we ignore the shoplifters.
Bricker, I think we are in agreement. I’ll monitor the thread but, unless something dramatic arises, I’ll not further thrash a prostrate equine.
John Kennelly-- I’d go with imbecile. Sufficient at that.
And no, we can’t ignore the shoplifters and other relatively petty criminals. Neither should we ignore or otherwise accept the bumbling attempts at sexual predation of these creeps. But let’s keep this in perspective.
Perverted Justice approaches their (“its”?) mission with an almost religious fervor. These perps are evil, we need to ferret them out and deal with them, anybody that can’t see this is ignorant, after all, think of the children!!
My personal discomfort meter begins a traverse around the dial whenever I hear statements like this. Such fervor in any cause can lead to serious problems, and a steady rein needs to be held on the fervor to ensure it does not sacrifice truth and reality. Seeing the actual miscreants who have been caught so easily and so publicly by PJ and Chris Hanson does nothing to reduce my feeling.
So mine is not a call to ignore these perps, nor to forgive them. But I wish that instead I could see some assurance that the really scary people out there, the real pedophiles who are raping their own children, or their neices, or their students-- that PJ or somebody was making an equal good faith effort to find *these * monsters. And not just taking the easy publicity to hype their cause afforded by such as Dateline.
Your point is a good one – if i can summarize it it with my own twist, it’s that the massive publicity created by Dateline’s airing creates almost a false sense of security and accomplishment – “Look, we’re catching all the scary predators!” – when in reality the scariest of them are not really vulnerable to these kinds of stings and remain safely out of reach. By thus doing, Dateline in a way makes the problem worse, by creating the impression that they’re doing more than they are.
Apparently, by “review of your prior posts”, you meant “total unwillingness to scroll up”. Here, I’ll help:
Snip an assload of my posts about how very few 14-year-old girls would encourage, not rebuff, the average middle-aged man on the Internet, which implies my already-stated viewpoint that incest and rape are far bigger issues that this show completely glosses over. See also:
Long-time lurker, big-time reader who is posting on a topic almost 7 years old. I ended up doing significant (for me) time over drugs. Usual impossible to find work after getting out. I expected that. So, anyhow, I was in a half-way house. Once in a while we would eat together and watch TV. This was not mandated, just the guys who really seemed to want to stay clean. These shows were the only thing that we would agree on. 1/4 agreed with my ST:TNG, 1/2 wanted BET and someone tossed out MSNBC. So we ended up watching the Georgia one. Furious debate similar to this board but with lots of cussing and cigarette breaks. One element I want to add to the above discussion came out during our lively ‘debates’. The creepy ‘decoys’ (and NOT the honeys they had at the sting) would be better named if they were ‘Perverts for Justice’ If you can stomach it, go to YouTube and check it out. Del is so creepy. And the ones on the phone? You can tell they REALLY dig pretending they are kids. And then hit the website and pick a chat-log. As icky as they get, the ‘decoy’ is digging it big time. I guess it was the crimes, since all of us were in for drug-related stuff. I am more worried about SETI attracting Klingons than I am about getting busted for any of that ‘predator’ stuff. Out of curiosity, I looked up what happened to some of the cats from the Georgia. They drew significant time, like a nickel or above. Watch Del and Don Cheech to see what happens when rank amateurs like to play cops. OK, back to lurking…
At first I was enraged by the possibility of zombie pedophiles.
But then I thought about it – maybe they only prey on zombie children. After all, surely the urge for brains would override any other urges on encountering a living human?