WORLD: American paedophile hunting sting goes horribly wrong and results in member being shot by their suspect

Since the emergence of social media, paedophile hunting or child protection groups have been a common thing in Britain amongst working class communities.

These groups make it their mission to adopt decoy profiles online of children aged under 16 and to catch would be predators, who they then expose in sting operations.

These sting operations are often livestreamed and posted to social media, which involve the suspect being confronted in a civil manner about what they have engaged in, some of who literally attempted to meet what they thought was a child or send explicit photos of themselves.

To the credit of groups such as Guardians of the North, or the Child Online Safety Team, their operations have brought hundreds of paedophiles to justice and diverted them away from targeting real children. Although police have not always appreciated the efforts of such groups, communities support the moral purpose they serve.

However, it also remains true that whatever we do in Britain, the Americans tend to do it in a more extreme and dramatic way. Recently, an online paedophile hunting team has been going viral on social media. Titled the “Colorado Ped Patrol”, the group consists of a duo of American working class men who also create decoy profiles, catch out would be predators and confront them.

That’s where the similarity ends. In Britain, while paedophile hunting groups are civil, restrained and hand their targets to the police, in contrast, this duo seek to make the sting as big of a scene as possible, going as far as actively humiliating and assaulting their suspects. They don’t get the police involved at all, believing beating them up passes as punishment.

Videos quickly went viral on twitter of the two men actively slapping and punching suspected paedophiles inside of supermarkets and shopping centres all over America, and even shouting from the rooftops to draw as much attention as possible. Sometimes if the suspects attempted to flee, they even rammed them with shopping trolleys. Even an elderly man living in a retirement home in Boston was punched by them.

While social media naturally finds the humiliation of the suspected paedophiles funny, in terms of legal implications and what could go wrong, there’s big problems afoot.

Although it should not surprise you that most of the suspected predators they confronted were arguably weird, socially inept and therefore weak men, we might remind ourselves that this country is the United States. We know that in America people have access to something to defend themselves in a way that other countries don’t, and thus making videos confronting, attacking and humiliating people was always a disaster waiting to happen.

Within weeks of going viral, the Colorado Ped Patrol bit off more than they can chew. The duo decided to confront a suspect who was a six foot something black man. Not only did he beat the team up in seconds as they attempted to humiliate him in the supermarket, but then it turned out he was armed too and subsequently shot one of them in the leg.

Worse still, the police were not sympathetic to the incident they caused and the paedophile hunting duo are now the ones facing criminal charges for the incident, and not the suspected paedophile. Despite this, the video of the incident still got out on social media, which you can see below.

Paedophile hunting is always dangerous business, as you are confronting unpredictable if not dangerous people. Double that in America when you never know if your target just might have a gun waiting for you.