Paedophile hunters jeopardising police work, says senior officer

Stings by self-styled paedophile hunters – who pose as children online to catch potential sexual predators – are diverting “significant resources” into the protection of suspects, police chiefs have said.

After a court ruled in favour of a group that argued that it should face no official oversight, Ch Con Simon Bailey, of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said the group’s activities could jeopardise investigations.

Bailey, the national policing lead on child abuse investigation, said so-called paedophile hunters were “taking risks they don’t understand”.

“Revealing the identity of suspected paedophiles gives the suspect the opportunity to destroy evidence before the police can investigate them,” he said. “It can jeopardise ongoing police investigations and these people have no way of safeguarding child victims.” He also warned that wrongful allegations could have grave consequences for those accused.

The paedophile hunters – who reject the term vigilante – say that in private police are supportive of their work and provide advice. They argue that they simply gather evidence and never seek to mete out punishment.

But Bailey’s warning also follows the news on Easter Sunday that a brawl broke out at Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, when a group called The Hunted One livestreamed themselves meeting a man they claimed was grooming a child.

The video broadcast online shows then shows members of the public apparently punching and kicking the man.

Kent police said two men – Lee John Harvey, 20, and Joe Simpkin, 20 – had been charged with affray, and Mirza Mispa Beg, 29, charged with grooming.

Bailey said such incidents could lead to suspects “going missing or raising concerns for their safety. This can divert significant resources into protecting suspects, which would be better invested in investigating and, where there is evidence, prosecuting them.”

The phenomenon of paedophile hunters was first widely publicised in 2014, when Channel 4 aired a documentary called The Paedophile Hunter, which followed Stinson Hunter and his associates as they posed as children online to catch potential sexual predators.

The same year an inquest heard that Michael Parkes, 45, killed himself after being confronted and filmed by Hunter. Parkes had been arrested, but not charged, by Northamptonshire police on suspicion of meeting someone he thought to be a 12-year-old girl for sex.

Bailey said the consequences for potentially wrongly accusing someone in such a public way could be grave. “The temptation [for the accused] to kill themselves may be just as great even if they are innocent; that is an appalling consequence to contemplate,” he said.

There are estimated to be 10 active paedophile hunting groups in the UK, with many claiming to have been responsible for scores of convictions of sexual predators.

The Hunted One, a group of eight men and women, claims to have conducted about 56 stings and boasts of a 100% conviction rate from subsequent arrests, which amounts to more than 40 years of prison sentences.

Stings by the Newcastle-based Dark Justice, which consists of two men in their 20s, have resulted in 48 convictions, with about 40 other cases active.

Ben Bleach, 32, a member of The Hunted One, says while the police are critical of such groups in public, they privately provide advice and support on how to conduct stings.

“The police are like us. They’re human beings,” he said. “They have families, so they understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.”

This month, legal teams acting for two men who were caught by Dark Justice allegedly attempting to sexually abuse minors argued that the use of evidence gathered by such operations “diminished the integrity of the court process”, and that the groups should be governed by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, which public bodies are bound by.

In a subsequent judgment given at Newcastle crown court, Mr Justice Langstaff ruled there was no legal requirement for the activities of such groups to be subject to controls.

He concluded that the members of Dark Justice had “acted as private citizens throughout” and, as such, “authorisation of them by any public authority to act as a covert human intelligence source was and is not required by law”.

The Hunted One was launched about 18 months ago and members operate aliases online in their spare time, sometimes talking to people in chatrooms on lunch breaks.

The two members of Dark Justice gave up their jobs in October 2014 to look for sexual predators full-time, and are funded by donations from the public. Both live off their overdrafts.

Dark Justice does not livestream its stings, saying it can result in the “predator being turned into the victim”, whereas The Hunted One believes livestreaming draws the public’s attention to the problem and creates more reliable evidence for court.

Both groups object to the term vigilante. “A vigilante is a person who takes the law into their own hands and hands out punishment,” Scott, 26, from Dark Justice, said. “We’ve never once handed out punishment.”

A statement on Dark Justice’s website says the group never approaches anybody online first. They immediately tell the people they are speaking to that they are underage and they try to avoid sexually explicit conversation. They never suggest meeting up. “They come to us,” said Scott.

In a statement, Dame Vera Baird QC, chair of the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners and Northumbria’s police and crime commissioner, was less critical of paedophile hunters than other senior police figures have been, saying their activities had resulted in a significant number of convictions.

“We need to find a way to ensure this type of activity is carried out as safely as possible, with appropriate focus on minimising the risks to the volunteers and the subjects of their activity, while maximising the chance of getting a conviction,” Baird said.

Bleach said he often received emails from people interested in trying to catch predators online. People who were attracted to such work had often either been abused as children or were close to people who had been, he said.

“[The group] is run through passion,” Bleach said. “We know first-hand how much damage it does to people’s lives, not just as children but when they get older.”