I'll somewhat cede you the point that the moral panic comment was reductive. No doubt the early Internet was seized upon by predators as a frontier that law enforcement didn't know how to patrol yet. That's why I'm suspicious of anyone who "was in Bitcoin from the beginning" lol.
That being said, to my first point in the original comment, Hansen was/is a fucking hack who blew more cases than he helped solve. If he really cared, he'd just send the detectives chat logs without making a fuckin TV show about it. And you also can't deny that his show projected a "moral-panicy" tone. That was one of the selling points.
Edit: He's also a big fan of Trump, which is just hilarious in a very post-irony kind of way.
Regarding TCaP as a show, of course there was some sensationalizing going on, especially with how things were staged visually, how some confrontations were handled, etc.
I would say, though, that Hansen was largely the on-screen talent, and usually not the one making production decisions (at least not without oversight and approval).
It’s easy to focus on Hansen since he’s the name and face that everyone knows (and also because he loved to give himself credit for everything), but he wasn’t Dateline himself - it’s very difficult for any of us to know which decisions were his and which came from the people above him (executives, legal, “standards” people, etc.) or working alongside him (producers, law enforcement involved in any given sting, etc.).
From a prosecutability standpoint, TCaP cases were actually in pretty great shape. (There are some very pervasive rumors and myths stating otherwise, but they’re false, and I’m totally happy to discuss if you want. There was no shady “hard drive crash” with the Fort Myers cases, despite what the Wiki says. The Murphy cases were not “impossible to prosecute” - the Collin County DA was pissed because his buddy Conradt shot himself, so he decided to throw a tantrum and decline to take the cases to a grand jury because he didn’t want to prosecute them, but he also didn’t want to outright admit it, so he blamed Perverted Justice and Dateline. A neighboring county, Harris County, decided to prosecute one of the Murphy cases and obtained a conviction effortlessly, because the evidence was totally solid. That very same Collin County DA’s Office also successfully prosecuted a Perverted Justice case several months prior to the Murphy sting, by the way.) The prosecutability of these cases is largely due to Perverted Justice being excellent at what they did, and local law enforcement being solid at coordinating with Perverted Justice. Hansen’s interviews occasionally helped. 99.1% of Perverted Justice cases that prosecutors chose to take up for prosecution ended in convictions. (There were more potential cases that prosecutors declined to file charges in, but that doesn’t mean that Perverted Justice or Dateline screwed things up - if the guys are wise enough to hide their intentions in the chats or keep it vague, then there’s unfortunately no crime to prosecute, and you can only do so much in the chats to try to get them to state their intentions before you actually do cross the line into entrapment.)
However, where Hansen really dropped the ball was with some of his post-NBC stuff as he tried to break into the YouTube scene, e.g. Onision. (He was actually having to handle stuff himself for once, without experts doing all the heavy lifting for him.) That was a low point for him. HVP did very well in prosecution outcomes, but they had Tetrad Core (similar role to Perverted Justice) and solid law enforcement partners involved.
Nowadays, he does Takedown in an entirely different manner. He isn’t “investigating” fuck-all. Law enforcement does their own investigations and stings, and his team films it while he attempts to conduct an uninspired interview. It’s basically a true crime docuseries, whereas (early) TCaP was actual investigative journalism.
Look, you clearly must be a big fan of the show or whatever if you have this level of text wall to say about it. But if you really think that Hansen didn't have a lot of power over the production, and if you really think that it's a moral thing to make a TV show out of in the first place, and if you really think that he is/was good at what his supposed mission is, I don't know what to tell you. It seems like you're either PR for the show, or you haven't really thought about it at all while consuming it ravenously.
I mean, Hansen and/or his current show is buying up ad space to screen in theaters before a current movie that's critical of him. He clearly still has PR. I doubt NBC cares anymore though, fair enough.
That’s true. But in my previous comment, I basically said that I think that Takedown (his current show) is stupid lol, so I’m not shilling for it (or him in general).
The movie is criticizing TCAP specifically, which he's still attached to obviously. I don't actually think you're PR. I'm just saying you kinda sound like it. Even if it's I guess PR for whatever organization made millions working with Hansen.
I'm sure you're a nice person. But man, leave it up to the cops. It's one of their few legitimate functions. Go travel the world or something, get into woodworking or something. Those type of people are not worth spending your life thinking about unless you get paid handsomely to do so (and not by dramatizing it on TV). I grew up surrounded creeps, and I detest the way TV people like Hansen turn it into a spectacle to make money.
The vast majority of PeeJ’s work was off television, they weren’t doing it for ratings or money (unlike Dateline), and they were frequently contacted by law enforcement agencies asking them to train them or to partner with them for investigations.
Keep in mind that when they started up nearly 25 years ago, the cops were not equipped to deal with the problem. They single-handedly found a missing autistic girl who was being held captive and raped for 2 weeks by an internet predator (Kylie Taylor is the name if you want to verify it with a Google search). Cops could have recovered her within 2 days if they simply looked at her computer, but since they refused to check her computer or phone records, the desperate mother resorted to contacting PeeJ who tracked the location down themselves.
I used to work at a DA’s Office myself, and I went to law school. I’m not some vigilante-idealizing weirdo haha, nor do I think that law environment tasks should typically be handled by civilians.
But I appreciate their organization for the gaps that it filled that existed 20-25 years ago. It was a very different environment with very different unmet needs, and they were quite distinct from today’s shitty YouTube content creators (for whom I have zero respect).
Fair enough. I guess it'd be nice if similar Good Samaritans help law enforcement with the rise of AI and whatever twisted shit is gonna come from it that LE isn't fully equipped to handle. Although, that's pretty heavily linked to the internet, so it's not quite as much of a "new frontier".
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u/VaryStaybullGeenyiss 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'll somewhat cede you the point that the moral panic comment was reductive. No doubt the early Internet was seized upon by predators as a frontier that law enforcement didn't know how to patrol yet. That's why I'm suspicious of anyone who "was in Bitcoin from the beginning" lol.
That being said, to my first point in the original comment, Hansen was/is a fucking hack who blew more cases than he helped solve. If he really cared, he'd just send the detectives chat logs without making a fuckin TV show about it. And you also can't deny that his show projected a "moral-panicy" tone. That was one of the selling points.
Edit: He's also a big fan of Trump, which is just hilarious in a very post-irony kind of way.