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Police say they are following up after a video posted online claims to have outed a sexual predator in Saskatoon.
The video was posted to Facebook by a man calling himself Craig Charles, which is an alias. It shows Charles confronting a man he claims came to a meeting expecting to find a 15-year-old girl.
Speaking on Gormley, Charles said he set up a fake dating site profile in order to lure men looking for sex with underage girls.
“It took me less than three hours to get 150 people wanting to already meet up and hook up and stuff,” he said. Charles claimed all but four of those 150 responses came from within Saskatchewan, with the remainder mainly coming from Alberta.
Charles said he has cautioned people against going after the man in the video.
“I’m strictly doing it to protect the children and so parents are well aware of the situations that are happening in this world,” he said.
Charles also posted what he claims are transcripts of the online chat between himself and the man he confronted in the video.
Sergeant Darren Parisian, a police officer with the Internet Child Exploitation Unit (ICE), said despite people’s best intentions, actions like Charles’ don’t help police.
“The problem is, it doesn’t necessarily translate into anything we can actually act upon or deal with,” he said.
Parisian pointed to the example of To Catch a Predator, an NBC television series that ran from 2004 to 2007. The show featured host Chris Hansen confronting people set up to think they were meeting underage people for sex.
“It wasn’t police officers conducting those stings. They weren’t following evidentiary rules, and eventually people committed suicide or they harmed themselves or they sued the company, NBC or whatever – and that was the end of that type of sting going on,” Parisian said.
He warned that there could be consequences for people involved in making similar videos.
“You might also be sued, or if this individual gets assaulted — you may take a hand in that, and you might be held responsible,” he said.
As to Charles’ video, Parisian said the ICE unit will be looking into it, but they may not be able to lay any charges.
“A combination of the chats and the videos, it’s clear what was said here. The problem is all the things that might have happened before these chats took place in relation to where they met, what was said. Did they switch from the age they said they were? Or the age they said they werent? Did they share pictures?” he said.
Parisian urged anyone with information about a potential sexual predator to contact police.
In the video, the man alleged to be a sexual predator is seen driving a pickup truck bearing the decal of a local auction company. In a press release, the company noted they employed the man occasionally on a casual basis. The release went on to say the company has ended its dealings with the man and would not be contacting him to work again.
