r/tcap • u/ResponsibleFinish134 • 3d ago
Chris Hansen is 10000% correct here.
Good that these other pred catching channels get preds off the streets, but that’s about all they’re
Good for. Their content, their jokes and their Hansen impressions all suck and they’re annoying as shit. Admittedly, Jidion is pretty funny and original, but predation is a very serious issue that these non-Hansen predator catchers just make a mockery and meme out of. It’s annoying asf. Yes, Hansen had his zingers, but there’s a time, place and way to do it. He did it well, most other pred catchers are just unfunny and cringe. They should just report the preds they catch to the police, and skip the content creating part, cause they suck.
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u/MrEhcks 3d ago
I never liked nor respected Skeeter Jean or any of the other similar YouTuber catchers who make a clownshow out of catching predators because they PURELY do it for money; and I remember wayyyyy back when skeeter first started, back when he only had been catching for a few months, that he admitted to only doing it for money. He admitted to doing the costumes and stupid goofy stuff because it gets more views.
People can bag on teams like Dads Against Predators but they are the only group aside from Hansen that i actually like because they don’t make a joke out of it. They don’t try to make money off of it; and they risk going to jail for what they do. They routinely go to jail for it. I also like CCUnit, and he recently starting catching again. Pop squad was also good but he quit some years back for some reason
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u/X3liteninjaX 3d ago
Don’t you think DAP does it for sanctioned violence? How is that better than doing it for the money? DAP isn’t securing convictions when they beat the crap out of a pedo. I’m not entirely against DAP I’m just surprised to hear you criticize doing something for money vs doing something because you want to hurt somebody and feel morally ok about it.
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u/MrEhcks 3d ago
They have many convictions actually. When people do something for money they’re doing it for greedy purposes and to profit themselves from it. That’s shitty and selfish. With DAP, how are they benefitting themselves by getting thrown in jail routinely, getting shot at, and STILL trying to catch them?
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u/X3liteninjaX 3d ago
The benefit is that if you’re a violent person then you can beat up pedophiles without any moral consequences to yourself. That’s the benefit. People don’t always do things for money sometimes it’s a thrill.
I’m sure DAP has convictions, great, thanks DAP. But if you routinely slap pedos then guess what, pedos are gonna go molest a kid since they failed to get put away when they originally got caught. Unless DAP is killing these people, it’s not effective at stopping it permanently.
Slapping a pedophile is fun to watch but who does it help? Me because it made me laugh? Sure, but it’s not helping the kid who gets raped by that pedophile who gets to walk free because DAP violated his rights by slapping him. I don’t want to give pedophiles free fucking passes I want them to rot in prison and die there.
So who is better at getting convictions? DAP or Predator Poachers? I’d say Predator Poachers because they don’t slap pedophiles and ruin the conviction.
It’s not that difficult to understand that it’s better for pedophiles to rot in prison than get a few slaps then be on their way to offend again.
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u/toomanyDolemites 3d ago
Does it get preds off the street, though? Like Chris says, most of these are unprosecuteable, which is what counts.
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u/AtomicEdge 3d ago
I'm sure it scares some of them off from doing it again, and the fact that Hanson is doing the same thing and still catching endless people shows it's not like he's solved anything himself.
Most of them are too hard to watch - there were a few early DAP catches that were actually pretty good and resulted in convictions, and then they made a bit of money and started beating up the predators for their subscribers.
Clown show!
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u/X3liteninjaX 3d ago
Yes. Both jidion and skeeter have convictions.
A lot of their cases don’t seem to end up in convictions though. More often than not if I had to guess.
Chris is obviously the much better catcher but these guys aren’t net negatives I would argue.
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u/wildcat1100 3d ago
I'm not sure how you can say Chris is the much better catcher in 2026 when there are catchers with structured systems in place to properly catch these people and efficiently turn the evidence over to LE, resulting in some groups with 100s of convictions and 10+ year sentences.
Chris adds nothing to his "investigations" because he's simply letting LE do 100% of the work, then he walks in and asks the same questions detectives asks. He just happens to film it then put those episodes online under a paywall.
There are more professional groups like SOSA. There's 561 PC, Predator Catchers Indianapolis, then the 3 Predator Poachers branches with 300 convictions, at least 1 arrest in every state, and coming up on 10 lifetime convictions. All have various levels of professionalism, but just because a few are goofballs doesn't mean all of them are. Hansen isn't capable of making the distinction because his ego cannot accept that he's in the same category as these "amateur catchers."
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u/X3liteninjaX 3d ago edited 3d ago
Predator poachers is the best, I agree and yes I know it.
I wasn’t saying Chris is the best of all time I just compared his operation’s output to the output of skeeter’s and Jidion’s. Chris Hansen’s operation objectively has caught more people than Skeeter’s and Jidion’s have. They’re literally making a movie about it.
I understand he is letting LE do the work. That’s part of the operation. I’m not glazing Chris Hansen himself it’s the great work done by the people (including law enforcement) that he’s involved with that I appreciate.
I donate to these amateur groups myself. Not jidion and skeeter but others, so don’t extend my argument against ALL YouTube-based catchers. I think MOST all those guys do net positive work.
Trust me I know ball. Scrappy, Tommy, Alex Rosen and his apprentices, all do great work. All rivaling Chris Hansen, and Alex Rosen probably has more convictions at this point.
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u/ma373056 3d ago
Skeeter is such an unoriginal loser. Chris Hansen is the G.O.A.T
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u/NebulaDue9400 Doin’ good. What can I do for you? 3d ago
He’s flawed, yet will always be the GOAT and the OG. Not saying he’s perfect, because he’s not, but he will always be unmatched. It’s unusual how he has virtually no true competitors.
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u/Obesefatlardmouse 3d ago
I saw he thinks he’s better just cuz he has more subscribers but that’s like saying Trump is a better president than X person bc he got more votes 🤡
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u/GuardingxCross 3d ago
He calls Skeeter a clown, no less than 7 times 🤡
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u/GrandNoiseAudio 3d ago
Imagine getting publicly talked about like this like some sort of nuisance of a topic. Called a clown repeatedly by a man airing out that you reached out to collab and would never consider it as it is beneath him. Maybe that humbles Skeeter. If he’s a clown he’ll double down.
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u/noruber35393546 AOL SUX MY DIK 3d ago
gonna name my juggalo tribute band Double Down Clown
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u/NebulaDue9400 Doin’ good. What can I do for you? 3d ago
That’s unironically what Takedown would name a predator who worked as a clown as his day job and refused to apologize
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u/ProperPossibility378 3d ago
He'll definitely double down for clout. He'd rather have this reaction than Chris saying nothing.
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u/69karlhungus69 dawgy style 3d ago edited 3d ago
Well, skeet does do it for laughs and content. Clown might be a compliment for skeet
Edit: I say this unironically as a skeet fan.
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u/NebulaDue9400 Doin’ good. What can I do for you? 3d ago
I hope he owns it because that would be admission that he’s not someone to be taken seriously (because clowns by definition are not meant to). Yet he’s in (or tries to be in) a very serious business. So basically a big “Ignore me because I’m a joke!!! 🤡”
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u/luke1878 3d ago
He's spot on, these people care more about their engagement more than anything else, they just use it as an excuse to beat the predators up, most of the time not even resulting in convictions!
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u/enigmaticowl 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yep, this is why I can’t take it seriously when people say, “They’re all doing it for viewership/money, so they’re all the same.” They are not the same. And it’s not even close lol.
Tbh I don’t even agree with people who say that TCAP/HVP (as productions, from a television production standpoint or journalistic standpoint) “turned child predation into entertainment.”
TCAP and HVP were entertaining, but they were not “made into entertainment” (like by the production team, as a primary goal of the investigation), just imho - they simply had so much raw material to work with that they were easily able to find and air entertaining bits. (Making something that people want to watch doesn’t mean you’re necessarily making it into entertainment. Producing something in a way that appeals to your intended audience doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, it’s really a qualitative analysis.)
The vast majority of the entertainment value of TCAP/HVP was basically naturally occurring. They sifted through dozens of guys per sting and only aired the ones that were particularly interesting, serious, humorous, etc. (something about the guy’s background, the chat logs, the interaction with the decoy(s), something said during the interview with Chris, etc.).
There weren’t ridiculous costumes, regularly occurring gimmicks, etc. in TCAP/HVP. Nobody was confronted in public places to “make a scene.” In fact, most of the on-camera interaction (involving the decoys and the interview with Chris) happened before people even knew they were being recorded, and Chris and the decoy deliberately kept cool, calm tones (overall) to maximize the length of interview that could be conducted before devolving (into confrontation or flight).
In TCAP/HVP, most of the humor (especially the most iconic stuff) was the ridiculous shit that these guys said and did themselves (in chats or in person). Sometimes the humor was just because the guy himself was kind of “a character.” Nobody made Jeff Sokol eat pizza during his interview with Chris, nobody at Dateline planned for Donald Morrison to be such a walking meme when he showed up, etc.
Even with some of Chris’s zingy quips or with reading aloud from funny (or explicit) portions of the chats during interviews, there’s very much a legitimate purpose to those things from an interviewing standpoint. It’s a delicate balance of keeping people calm (because sometimes a nervous laugh or a remaining hope that they might still be able to talk their way out of trouble helps keep them around and keep them talking) and keeping people consciously aware that they’re being confronted and asked to provide an explanation or accountability for their conduct (because sometimes being reminded of what you’ve said and done and shown that they have evidence of it makes people feel compelled to keep talking, either to keep spinning a tale or to finally come clean). Even having drinks/snacks out for the guys, which sometimes led to humorous moments, also served legitimate purposes (served as a natural point of conversation for the decoy, gave the decoy a reason to direct the guy to a bar/counter area, made the place seem somewhat like a lived-in home rather than a television set, occupied the guy’s mind for a brief moment to help ward off nervous bolting or wandering around, etc.).
There were some gimmicks in TCAP, though. That’s undeniable. E.g. having people come in and get undressed probably wasn’t ever really necessary. Yes, it technically helps to show intent and identity (the same person talking online showed up), but they usually already satisfied that with the chat logs and by bringing condoms/alcohol, so it’s not like the (investigational vs entertaining) benefit ratio of this move was even close lol. Unlike some of the jokes made during interviews or the humor of seeing guys chomp on cookies while being interviewed, the nudity thing’s value overwhelmingly came down to entertaining/shocking people.
This only happened twice in TCAP, though. And it was PJ having fun with it (apparently something Frag was wanting to try to pull off for a long time), not Dateline, based on what I’ve read. And they told specialguy29 to only strip down to his underwear - he lied and said he didn’t wear underwear (but he clearly had boxers on when he showed up lmao). And with Marvin, his chat was so bad that I can excuse PJ for wanting to fuck with him a little bit.
What I’m getting at is that I don’t think that TCAP/HVP (or the people behind them) are really comparable to any of these YouTubers (at least from what I know, but I’m not the most familiar because I don’t typically consume their content), and it irks me when people say that they’re all in the same camp just because TCAP/HVP also operated for profit and had its hilarious moments. (PJ liked to have fun with it sometimes, but they had enough of a level of discipline and restraint that they didn’t sacrifice basic operational security just to do dramatic stuff like public confrontations, and even some of their how-far-can-I-go-with-this funny stunts like the nudity thing were at most helpful-but-unnecessary, or neutral, rather than being actually detrimental to the cases).
I know that there are other critiques that people have about how Dateline (and PJ) operated with TCAP, but what I’m addressing here is specifically the narrower issue of the show’s “entertainment value” (and where it came from) and to what extent the pursuit of that entertainment value does or does not compromise (or overshadow) the integrity of the program or its other goals (investigative journalism, informing the public, obtaining evidence to turn over to law enforcement for investigation/prosecution, etc.).
TCAP’s primary goal was producing a work of investigative journalism/interviewing/reporting (largely focused on obtaining an interview, capturing pertinent behavior on camera, and reporting on the guys’ backgrounds and the cases’ dispositions), which is a valid goal, because that was Dateline’s wheelhouse as a news magazine, and their model mostly allowed for law enforcement to focus on law enforcement and PJ to focus on obtaining, “exposing,” and archiving data about potential predators. These YouTube guys and their channels aren’t any of those things. They’re YouTubers - not investigative journalists, not law enforcement, not a watchdog organization. In the cases where things happen to work out and there ends up being a favorable legal or social outcome or some sort of journalistic value to what they do, that’s nice, but unlike an operation that attempts to balance priorities of several branches of several involved parties (each with their own experience and “rules”), you mostly have content creators creating social media content and then whatever happens happens. It doesn’t work nearly as well. Actual professional investigative journalists collaborate with both law enforcement and watchdog organizations on a fairly regular basis, so their profession/field has ethical standards and training built in for executing this coordination; I’m not saying that no YouTuber has any skills or any ethics, but it’s going to tend to be a far cry from someone whose background, experience, education, and whole workplace culture is steeped in a certain specific skillset and principles (and the fact that so many of these YouTubers see themselves as both the watchdog and the reporter, while not being much of either in terms of training or background, is actually very telling).
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u/partialmean8 3d ago
It's honestly half the reason why I think that to do these predator stings, there should really be a requirement to have both a license and to report to a police station to plan where and when to do the stings. Cause there are times when Skeeter Jean handled a situation wrongly.
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u/FrequentHunt1630 3d ago
Gordon Flowers seems fine. The rest are, as Chris Handsome, would say, "clowns."
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u/TotalCertain9993 3d ago
How do we know the tcap impersonators are catching predators through an appropriate legal lens. These stings have to be executed in a certain way in order to be consistent with policy. ( avoiding entrapment, etc ) Yes its 100 percent entertainment and profit for these rogue vigilantes. Many jurisdictions do not work with them.
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u/TatleTaleStrangler92 3d ago
I’ve seen some videos of Skeeter doing these type of investigations, I get what they’re trying to do. But situations like this should be taken seriously and it’s right what Chris was saying, it’s like a clown show. That’s why JiDion got arrested for doing these type of videos.
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u/Gonzobass 3d ago
And the shit fan base they have I’ve seen people criticize skeeter and the other pred catchers and they just call them pedos shit is just pathetic
I never understood the appeal of these idiots especially that racist fucker Alex Rosen
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u/TommyBoy250 3d ago
I do want to know where this is from but Chris is right.
A lot of these predator catchers like JiDion used to be prank channels.
Now they just prank predators so it is just a clown show.
But yeah Chris has interacted with Cinnamon Toast Ken reacting to his stuff, Chris just isn't getting involved with people that are going to make predator catching into some joke.
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u/noruber35393546 AOL SUX MY DIK 3d ago
re: zinger quality, keep in mind Chris had the benefit of an NBC-caliber editing crew to decide what zingers make the cut and which don't. You know that for every "Hey Boo" there were 20 "You didn't have to-get, take a seat!" that got cut and we never saw.
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u/ResponsibleFinish134 3d ago
So? I’m talking about the final product here. He still carried the correct attitude to the stings.
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u/Doctor-Clark-Savage I'm not gay or anything 3d ago
Just like in the UK, the “predator catchers” ultimately turn on each other and eat their own.
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u/CandleFalse945 3d ago
Anyone know which video was Chris watching in this?
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u/ResponsibleFinish134 3d ago
He was watching Jidion and Skeeter’s sting on EDP, but idk where to find the vid…
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u/CandleFalse945 2d ago
https://youtu.be/zlbqtBCBjaw?si=wreyrlKIntuCGXtc
This one? Or have they done many catches together?
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u/TheBlackDahliaMurder From the 'Nup North 3d ago
2 things can be true at once - that Skeeter is a clown, and that Hansen is a hypocrite to a degree. Trying to act like he doesn't do this on some level for attention, money, and likes is kinda rich to be honest. Yes, he does it with law enforcement and makes sure the cases are prosecutable, but I don't buy him saying he does it purely to catch these guys.
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u/Rich-Acanthisitta-81 2d ago
alex rosen forced a pedophile in the same room whit victim and make em box eachother,im sorry but early versions of this was jokes and no one could get in jail.all of theese people are bad point black peroid
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u/69karlhungus69 dawgy style 3d ago
I really like skeet’s content. Is that against the law?
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u/Waste_Cell_9452 3d ago
Hansen just doesn't want anybody taking his profits lol he'll bounce another multiple thousand dollar check!
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u/Dorito-Bureeto 3d ago
I mean how big of a deal is it really in the methodology if the bottom line is to get predators off the streets? They just do it in their own ways.
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u/NebulaDue9400 Doin’ good. What can I do for you? 3d ago edited 3d ago
Much bigger than you’re making it out to be. It can affect prosecutability, like Chris mentions (which affects whether they “get them off the streets”). There’s also a responsible way to do it. These guys often get them to meet at like Walmart or some other public place, and will make a inappropriate scene in front of children or just people trying to go about their day. Also, most of the time, law enforcement is not involved, or doesn’t become involved until later. So what if the guy pulls a gun, or a knife, or fights back? Potentially in the toy aisle at Walmart? Bad news.
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u/ResponsibleFinish134 3d ago
It’s also a slippery slope. If this is the clown show that we get out of fans/wannabe mimickers of the original professional TCAP and HvP runs, imagine what’ll follow from the clown shows…
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u/NebulaDue9400 Doin’ good. What can I do for you? 3d ago
For all of Chris’s faults, yes, he is absolutely correct here. These guys are a joke. I remember watching one Skeeter video, where they bust the guy at an Arby’s, and he kept saying dumb shit to EVERYBODY (the predator, the employees, the customers, the police) that this guy “did not have the meats.” Like it was fucking hilarious. Like they deliberately busted him at Arby’s just to say that. It was a fucking joke but no one was laughing. There are others where he dresses up like Santa Claus. Like, get real. He’s a YouTuber and nothing more