"It’s impossible for the police to manage alone." Hesther Ng/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.
It began on Friday night, when a self-proclaimed “online child protection team” live-streamed claims about Adrian Smith, an alleged paedophile, on social media. The man was swiftly arrested — though the police soon released him. Yet by Saturday, at about 6:40pm, Smith was dead, falling from a height onto the M4 near Bristol.
The police insist they welcome the public’s assistance in the fight against crime. Chief Constables urge us to become special constables, police station volunteers, neighbourhood watch coordinators. For many, though, beat-plodding and curtain-twitching don’t get the blood pumping quite as fast as paedo-hunting. There are over 100 such vigilante groups all over Britain, arranging stings and catching offenders — and journalists are increasingly keen to tag along as well.
As the M4 tragedy so desperately implies, however, online vigilantism can quickly go wrong. Lacking any of the protections offered by law, the targets of the mob are easily crushed. And even when they aren’t, online detectives often misunderstand the laws they claim to defend, with every dubious Facebook post putting justice in peril. But with the police in bureaucratic meltdown, and new tech making amateur sleuthing simpler than ever, don’t expect the paedo-hunters to vanish — quite the contrary, as vigilantism goes from online hobby to grim reality right across the country.
The appeal is understandable. It offers moral certainty, a sense of achievement and a soupçon of excitement. And, like most types of crime, paedophilia is impossible for the police to manage alone. Home Office statistics reveal nearly 40,000 child sex abuse image offences were logged in 2023-2024: and that’s only reported cases.
I recall a conversation with a former colleague, an officer I’ll call Mark. “The most depressing thing about this job?” he once told me. “After a while, you begin thinking everyone’s a paedophile.” Mark was starting his fifth year as a full-time covert internet investigator, and spent his days hunched over a keyboard, tracking predators. “There’s thousands of them,” I remember him telling me, exhaustion on his face. “You could nick ‘em all day and all night, there’d still be more.” Like many police officers, Mark thought the only way to manage these criminals was either life imprisonment without parole or capital punishment. Otherwise impeccably liberal doctors and academics I’ve met are similarly hawkish — citing the tactics paedophiles use when pretending to engage with treatment.
I myself have helped convict a would-be contact offender by posing as a paedophile, even if the nightmarish evidence, and the offender’s laughably short sentence, meant I subsequently declined work in the area. Yet, DIY paedo hunting only continues to soar — and not merely, I think, because of the ethical rush it provides. As Adrian Smith’s tormentors showed, all you need to start is an internet connection.
So-called “digilantism” arguably started after the Boston Marathon bombing, in 2013, when online sleuths tracked down witnesses and suspects. Never mind that their hit rate was dubious: a new craze was born. True crime podcasters now work cold cases, while wannabe spies glean data using satellite images. For their part, paedo-hunters have their own MO. After arranging a meeting between a fake child and their would-be abuser, they detain their targets and call the police, handing over the evidence they’ve gathered.
Collaboration between police and civilians isn’t wholly new. During my covert training, tabloid journalists were sometimes cast as Sherlock Holmes, the police as the hapless Lestrade. Back then, hacks were happier to go to the “real world” and confront their targets, warning us police in advance if they were about to buy guns or drugs. Then they’d hand over their notes and, I imagine, wander off to the pub. Their findings could even be compelling, even as they sometimes collapsed into hearsay. Like builders asked to come in and complete a half-done extension, the professional detectives would sigh and get on with it.
Given the shocking scale of paedophilia across Britain, one policeman I know is predictably sanguine. It helps that, among officers, paedophiles have a reputation for presenting negligible physical risks when confronted. As for the digilantes themselves, they seem increasingly aware of law and procedure. Many observe the “agent provocateur” principle of not encouraging a crime, which renders evidence inadmissible (this is the closest English law has to entrapment).
Paedo-hunters also video their activities for transparency. For officers given the task of arrest and prosecution, you might argue that the hard work’s already been done. It’s not dissimilar to the days when officers actually took shoplifting seriously: you’d arrive at a supermarket to find a thief sitting in the security office, a statement prepared and evidence bagged and tagged. Police called these mundane arrests a “GIC” (Given Into Custody). I must admit, I never thought I’d see the day paedophiles were treated as GICs.
Even so, the process isn’t flawless. First, there’s the welfare of the hunters. Notwithstanding their reputation, there’s always the chance that their targets will lash out when cornered. That’s before you consider the safety of the suspect. This is something police officers always do — and which some paedo-hunters clearly don’t. A broader issue is evidence. Though the digilantes are becoming more sophisticated, professional officers understand something they don’t: every theory, no matter how outlandish, offers a potential get-out when cases come to trial. In court, a barrister is perfectly entitled to ask: “Officer, why didn’t you investigate theory X or Y?”
Each piece of well-intentioned online speculation, then, might offer another slither of reasonable doubt. After the former Russian FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered, in 2006, I was given the job of investigating just such conjecture. I researched online allegations and spoke with experts to examine leads. Yes, internet sleuths, your caffeine-fuelled Reddit theory might end up being some poor detective’s day-job.
We’ve seen the limits of online detective work elsewhere too. The Nicola Bulley case is a prime example. She disappeared in January 2023, having fallen into a river. But the subsequent tsunami of poisonous, ill-informed commentary by TikTok “detectives” (some of whom arrived at the scene to create content) only impeded the investigation. Jay Slater, a 19-year-old tourist who fell into a ravine in Tenerife, faced a similar fate, with some true crime obsessives conjuring outlandish theories about how he died. That’s hardly strange. Crime has always been an adjunct to entertainment. And now the internet offers another dimension — interaction, immersion, even as the real-world suffering is all too real.
In the end, though, I suspect that some officers disapprove of digital paedo-hunters not for ethical reasons: but because it infringes on their turf. Most police work is boring. Once coveted detective roles now involve call-centre busywork. Local CIDs investigate a sisyphean landfill of safeguarding cases, domestic disputes and drunken assaults, all to satisfy arbitrary performance metrics. Little wonder officers seek to ringfence genuinely useful online work from amateurs — if UK policing were the British Empire, the few specialisms left would be like pre-1997 Hong Kong.
Ironically, of course, that bureaucratic malaise means officers are stuck with the amateurs whether they like it or not. To give one example, digilantes aren’t bound by the strictures of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The administrative treacle police wade through to monitor an open, publicly-viewable Facebook profile is comical. As I once said to my detective inspector: “I could just go home, boot up my laptop, use a VPN, intrusively research this suspect and phone the results into Crimestoppers. What’s to stop me?” The inspector shrugged.
As bureaucracy grows, and operational budgets shrink, it seems inevitable that digilantism will only increase — especially given the proliferation of easy-to-use online tools and AI. You could therefore argue a forward-thinking police service should incorporate digilantes into the investigative mix. They might offer training, or work towards some sort of licensing regime. That, I suspect, wouldn’t work. The entire point of being a vigilante is to be outside the system, a workaday superhero, stepping beyond the mundane. Batman was never a special constable with the Gotham PD. Batman never had to fill out a 12-page form for permission to monitor a Facebook page, or complete a risk assessment to knock on a front door. Batman never suffered DEI courses or spent days cutting-and-pasting his internet search history into a disclosure schedule. And, to my knowledge, Batman never gave evidence at Isleworth Crown Court.
More to the point, the end-user of a digilante’s work will always be a cop, posing significant risks when detectives are required to manage overenthusiastic or malicious actors. And if the challenges are clear enough online — depressingly apparent from the Canaries to Bristol — just wait until less internet-savvy vigilantes want in on the action too. With law and order collapsing from city centres to quaint Wiltshire villages, it makes sense that posses of wannabe superheroes are heading to the streets, with Birmingham just one of towns now stalked by gangs of vigilantes. But don’t worry: I’m sure the police have a form for reporting that too.
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Subscribe“the offender’s laughably short sentence”.
So many reported sentences are laughable (esp compared to those for hurty memes etc) that it seems as if the porn hunters should spend more time around judges!
I should imagine that any sane mother or father whose child or children have been abused, welcomes justice by whatever channel it is delivered. It’s hugely regrettable, as Dominic has described, that those formally authorised to provide that justice are then bogged down with bureaucracy. I do think Dominic’s idea of a ‘licensing’ regime is good, and you would hope that it would raise the bar in terms of separating those who are genuinely concerned with confronting this evil from thrill-seekers. Any youngster spared from the hands of perpetrators is a victory for child protection, but I have seen some ‘digital arrests’ where the subsequent trophy display goes beyond straightforward capture and handing over to the police, and does make you cringe. A license and training would encourage professionalism, but there is always the risk of political interference, which has been exposed in the many cases of rape and torture gangs being ignored for political expediency. How do you manage that? The vacuum left by the lack of day-by-day, visible policing is a magnet for crime and, subsequently, for people to take it upon themselves, rightly I think, to confront that crime. We need a visible, active police force that fights serious crime and is not wrapped up in issues that are within the remit of politicians and social workers.
I think the machete wielding drug youth in the Canarias likely fell – its a treacherous place to walk – sober or not, but i don’t know. I am less convinced the woman walking her dog “fell”. The dog was dry – and you know how much we owners love our dogs. But i don’t know. The writer does though – perhaps he’d like to share why he is so certain with the Juez de Primera Instancia in Tenerife. Also maybe its time the UK started a similar system – instead of just using hearsay the Juez de P.I. has to dig into the facts – an inquisition if you like. If he is lax his colleagues, the public and particularly the families of the deceased will get uppity.
This grooming by adults of children in chat rooms could be prevented if the exchanges had to be video only. Despite recent spectacular advances in AI, I imagine it will still be quite a while before a devious paedophile can use a video avatar of a child to converse with another “real life” child, without the latter (or the chat software) easily detecting the ruse.
I suppose the ubiquitous prevalence of these crimes is the explanation for why men caught with child sex abuse images are almost never imprisoned? I was beginning to suspect complicity on the part of the judiciary.
PS It’s “sliver” of doubt, not slither.
I would guess most of those imprisoned were primarily for offences attempted or committed with actual children, which led to the discovery of the child porn possession as a secondary matter. But even where the latter was the only offence, there are loads of factors to consider, such is this the perp’s first offence? Did they create the images in the first place, or have they distributed them to others? Do the images include videos, which are considered worse than photos? Also of course there is the age of the subjects in them to consider, and whether they look distressed or constrained in any way, etc, etc.
But I think (or hope!) the number of hardcore paedo critters attracted to pre-teens or even infants is very small, perhaps a couple of thousand tops in the UK, and probably most child porn “stashes” that come to light are of early teens. It’s also worth bearing in mind that these days anyone active in dealing with child porn will take determined steps to conceal their activities, using VPNs and encryption and so on. So I would guess that possession-only cases which incidently come to light involving early teens, though technically illegal, are in the absence of aggravating factors usually treated by the courts in much the same way they would some daft old fool who has been found with a rusty unlicenced WW2 revolver in his garden shed!
Yet another point to consider is that much of this apparent tsunami of child porn is produced by children themselves, by exchanging saucy snaps with each other on their smartphones! So provided no adults are involved, I don’t see why the police, instead of clogging up their forensic service with children’s smartphones for examination, don’t simply let the randy little sods get on with it!
I’ll be very interested to see any comments on the above by user Dumetrius, who has declared they worked professionally in this area.
It offers moral certainty…
It gives moral superiority.
An addictive rush, puffing up self-regard without yielding any self-knowledge.
After capturing their quarry, do the hunters go home and fiddle the income tax return, or use foul language in every other sentence while in conversation in the pub?
Miss Marple and Father Brown provided the wellspring for these unofficial associates of the police, strangely being invited to share in the investigation and tolerated as a fount of wisdom.
In the country of grooming gangs, vigilante justice is very far from the top of the list of problems that police needs to address.
Nobody was suggesting they should…..
Mob justice is terrifying, but better than no justice.
It’s what inevitably happens when the government fails at one of its few essential functions.
Who is responsible for keeping our communities safe? Modern society contracts it out to the police and then washes its hands and says ‘Not my business, mate’ as someone shoplifts, or vandalises or picks a pocket.
In history, the perception was that everyone is responsible for good order in their local community, and that the police were the ultimate enforcers – the end of the process and the force to take on situations that were too big, or too dangerous for local admonition. They are professionals who emerged from local vigilance – the end point, not the start point of law enforcement. The support put in place to assist the law abiding.
Instead, we seem to have a situation where the police are placed as the sole enforcers of the law. The public must keep out – report but don’t act.
Along the way, the police have retreated from their ‘fire-fighting role’ – doing the dangerous tasks and work that the public should avoid. And increasingly they are tied in legal knots where law breakers get protection, and the law abiding are prevented from taking action to protect themselves or their communities. The police are supposed to be on a side – they are not neutral – and that side is the side of the lawful who need help.
What’s worse is that the police seem increasingly to be making poor decisions about which crimes to chase and which to skip – picking cases that are easy over those that are important in defending community safety and trust. I’m uneasy about the paedo-hunters and vigilantism but shouldn’t the police be responding to public priorities?
That seems to depend on where they were born, what colour they are, and by what name they call God.
Surely that has played a part in the rise of vigilantism
Maybe it would help if detectives investigated paedophiles and not tweets.
In a woke tick box culture it is easier, safer and more advantageous to investigate tweets and upsetting words than actual attempted crimes.
This line is getting rather old. Of course detectives investigate paedophiles… there are literally whole departments dedicated to it.
Not really. If no tweets at all, ever, anywhere were investigated…and all “Non-Crime Hate Incidents” dismissed out of hand as derisively as possible…rather than carefully recorded…those unit might be a bit bigger. And there might even be the odd PC available to patrol the High Street and tackle shoplifters.
… or if they ceased knocking on grannies’ doors for having done absolutely nothing wrong, apart from pissing off local councillors who complained to the police!
Who polices the utterly useless judiciary who have been letting every foreign nonce off recently? On HR grounds.
If we don’t do it ourselves it won’t get done. In fact nothing will get done anyway. The police need a complete riot and branch sea change … it’s coming.
Ancient Greece, normally accepted as the genesis of Western Civilisation, took a rather different viewpoint to all this.
Pederasty was socially acceptable and formed part of the education system. It even continued into later life as the antics of the homicidal Macedonian* pygmy, otherwise known as Alexander the Great show all too clearly.
However the somewhat unfortunate intrusion of Semitic culture into the Classical World in the late fourth century rather put a stop to all this ‘hanky panky’ for better or for worse.
*Not quite a true Greek/Hellene but near enough.
Pederasty, as you describe it, was not what I had in front of me on my PC day after day in handling child porn reports.
Let’s be clear what we’re talking about here.
Indeed. Pederasty was (usually) the sexual love of young men or youths and older and (supposedly) wiser men. No ages specified, but I think the evidence shows they were not paedophilic in the sense we have today of that word.
The pederasty that Charles ascribes to Alexander was for another adult. Hephaeston, I think his name was, or something like that…
Spot on sir, Hephaestion it was!
Perhaps the most ‘notorious’ example was that of Hadrian and Antinous which predictably ended in tears when Antinous was found floating in the Nile.
I’m not attempting to excuse the degeneracy that you describe, who could frankly?
However I am saying that the adoption of Christianity necessarily brought with it all the neurotic sexual mores and practices of an alien Semitic culture rooted in the Judean desert. Even nudity was regarded with abject, and quite irrational horror.*
Greece and later Rome were far more tolerant and open minded in this regard, and perhaps this lack of any urge to ‘suppress’ was very beneficial?
Off course so pervasive have the Semitic mores become, that today if anyone ever thinks off Ancient Rome it is usually about a culture of Bacchanalian orgies and so forth, which is both ignorant and somewhat narrow minded, rather sadly.
*Perhaps this has something to do with the prevalence of sand?
I think the shift away from the socially accepted practice of older men sodomizing adolescent (and much younger) boys was a step in the right direction. And I didn’t need the redeeming love of Christ to figure that one out either.
Most contemporaries seem to have regarded it as rather deviant behaviour, and particularly so if you were the ‘lock’ in the arrangement rather that the ‘key’*.
Caesar for example never lived down the humiliation of an incident with Nicomedes, King of Bythinia, and was known by his enemies as the “Queen of Bythinia”.
Even his fabled Legions sang a ribald song about the event during his Triumph. Loosely translated it went something like this: “Caesar scr*wed the Gauls, but Nicomedes scr*wed him first.
*To use a ‘technical’ term.
Part of the reason why I abandoned the humanities and academia is because I could never tolerate the odor – that smell of ancient tweed and un-shampooed hair. Almost as a reflex one can imagine wrinkled pedants who can barely master a doorknob dazzling a dinner party clique with anecdotes about buggery in the Roman Empire.
Ha! You didn’t “figure it out”!. We are all the product of a very particular Western Christian civilization that has existed for over 1500 years, including we atheists. The Romans and the Greeks for example had no pity for for the poor or for crucified slaves etc. Theirs was a very different and quite alien civilization in many respects.
If you try and logically argue for moral principles, you rapidly get tied in knots. Why exactly is it bad to exterminate an inferior race whose genes are polluting yours?
Why downvotes?
Very fair description of the culture.
I never had ATG described as pygmy.
Both Arrian and Curtius describe ATG as ‘nano’.
Some modern authorities have speculated that he may even have had a spinal disorder.
Is there some particular reason why your (erudite!) but often provocative musings so often have little to do the subject? Distinctions matter.
A socially sanctioned form of homosexual relationship, (where actually the sexual elements might have been not even included “buggery” that you referred you to above), between an older, supposedly wiser man, and a youth, whom he was supposed to be educating, is not the same as raping pre-pubescent kids.
Re-enact Thomas Cromwell’s:
“An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie”, otherwise known as the Buggery Act, 1533.
There are too many of those in Parliament and MSM for this to ever happen.
Thanks mate for your usual insight and campaign for the country to return to 1950, or maybe 1850 – or it seems 1550!. Very popular policy, certainly.
I’m not sure why having sex with people of the same sex has anything much to do with abusing kids (yeah, we know, a small minority of “homosexual” oriented people do – as do a small minority of heterosexuals, and some who don’t much mind either way.
Sobering stuff. I used to work in online child porn reporting and the evidentiary hurdles for a government agency to even block a webpage & refer to police, were bad enough.
From reading the article it seems excess bureaucracy is the fundamental issue. The ‘digilantes’ are able to do things because they don’t have the bureaucracy, and the police don’t get as much done as they should because of the paperwork.
who polices the police who are paedophiles.
Just by law of averages , it’s reasonable to expect there to be a significant % within the Police force, that even the Met commissioner can’t sack
We see by many police forces reluctance to investigate these crime, cover them up many would say, that are they doing this because they told to, or kindred spirits
The police seem to recruit anyone who fit’s the right profile these days. Intelligence , integrity , critical thinking, knowledge of the law, empathy don’t seem to be required
The bureaucracy of reporting fraud, which is something that comes tumbling through the phone and internet across my path unbidden in a way sex crimes don’t, is so off-putting that every time I am tempted to pass on information to Action Fraud I give up.
It seems this is not a problem for nonce hunters.