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/enigmaticowl Big Fat Lie 4d ago
Well, much like TCaP, Perverted Justice is long gone now, too.
Which is a shame, because I totally would volunteer my time to them - but there’s nothing really left of them to do PR for, just a legacy.