Has ‘To Catch a Predator’ Done More Harm Than Good?
It’s all the same (only the names have changed): A man, and it’s always a man, starts chatting online with what he believes to be an underage boy or girl. The conversation either immediately or eventually turns explicitly sexual. He decides to take things one step further and arrange an in-person encounter. The man is greeted at the door by someone who appears to be a youngster, invited inside, and a minute or so after crossing that threshold, finds himself suddenly talking to another adult male in the room. I’m Chris Hansen, this third party says by way of introduction. Have a seat. How are you doing tonight? What’s going on here?
Sometimes, the guy recognizes Hansen. Other times, he has no idea who this handsome guy with the broadcast-news baritone is. Either way, you really begin paying attention to the first man’s face at this point. His look goes blank, or it registers complete and utter shock, or if he begins pleading or crying, his entire visage crumbles in real time. A host of different emotions play out. But it tends to end up in the universal expression for: I am totally fucked. You’re free to go, Hansen often says. If the man takes him up on this offer to leave, he’s met by the local police force, waiting patiently outside to arrest him.
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From 2004 to 2007, Dateline NBC aired “To Catch a Predator,” a series of segments that immediately attracted media attention for the way it turned the tools of online grooming against the sexual predators who used them. The people on the receiving end of those chats were decoys, as in adults posing as kids. The deviants trying to lure them into statutory rape, however, were real. The sting operations not only outed these men but publicly shamed them, and whether they expressed remorse or not over their actions, Hansen would inform them that they were now accountable for their actions. Everyone from Oprah to Leno praised these public-service efforts; Jimmy Kimmel dubbed it “Punk’d for pedophiles.” The claim was that they were educating the public about the new wave of “stranger danger” that had found a home on the internet. And if the segments doubled as must-see car-wreck TV and happened to make Hansen a celebrity, that was simply a bonus, right?
Already one of the most talked-about entries at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Predators — filmmaker David Osit’s compelling, critical and most-likely-to-cause-nausea doc on the show that turned schadenfreude into syndication-ratings gold and spawned copycats galore — has a few questions of its own it would like to ask. Like Hansen, the film wants to know what these men are doing there, having come to a nondescript suburban house with the intent of soliciting sex with a minor. It may be a compulsion on their part, but it’s also a crime no matter how you try to reframe it. But the movie and its maker are also curious about the effect of the show itself, how its quest for justice may have become muddled along the way, and what its popularity might say about us. Why have we kept tuning in to see these creeps get caught? Why has it taken a television show to bust them? In the long run, has To Catch a Predator actually done more harm than good?
No one would argue that getting sexual predators out of circulation and keeping children out of harm’s way is a bad thing. And like the series itself, Predators goes out of its way to give you a sense of how fucked up this scenario is in the first place. Hansen has a history of reading out chat-room transcripts, and things get ugly in those conversations quickly. The civilian group Perverted Justice, who worked with Dateline and Hansen on setting up these stings, exists for a reason. An opening segment, in which you get to observe a 37-year-old man anticipating having sex with who he thinks is a 13-year-old girl, is enough to make you vomit in your mouth. You assume the mere existence of To Catch a Predator is a deterrent, although men — college students, construction workers, lawyers, teachers, fathers, grandfathers — still seem to keep showing up in droves. A thirtysomething woman who spends her days luring sexual predators into these sting operations notes that “if they’re talking to me six hours a day, they’re not talking to someone’s kid.”
Yet Osit, who admits to being obsessed with the show when he was in his twenties, can’t help but wonder how a social scourge reduced to true-crime entertainment, complete with its own primetime agenda, has affected how we deal with the pathology itself. Specifically, the filmmaker wonders what it’s done to our sense of empathy overall: If you gaze into the abyss, etc. A Scandinavian ethnographer notes the intent to capture sexual predators and spare their prey is necessary, yet “it’s the means that’s troubling to me.” The spotlight has shown light on the big, bad wolves on the other end of those chats, yet the spotlight itself has perverted the process of real justice by making this a righteous spectacle. Law-enforcement participants cop to taking orders from producers during interrogations and making sure they get the best camera angles when cornering perps. Hansen himself acts like he’s an extension of the long arm of the law, and when he’s asked, “Are you a lawyer/police/private detective,” his answer is “We’ll get to that later.” No one’s told they can speak to a lawyer. Several behind-the-scenes folks are shown raw, unedited footage of interrogations, which remind you that these monsters are nonetheless fellow human beings. “I don’t wanna watch this,” one decoy says. “It’s making me feel sorry for them.”
The doc also pays close attention to a tipping-point moment that occurred in Murphy, Texas, in 2006, when one of the fake-boys was enticing a predator to come to their house. He promised he would, but never showed. Upon tracing the phone call, it was discovered that the man on the other end of the line was an assistant district attorney in a neighboring county. So, in a need to finalize the episode, the production crew showed up at his house. Police entered the premises and the man killed himself. The incident sparked a lot of questions as to how something like this could have happened, as well as numerous investigations into the show. Even the young man posing as decoy stated that “you could pay me millions of dollars, and I’d never go back and do it again.” The segment eventually ran, complete with a newscaster making wacky comments about other news stories buffering it.
Predators also looks into the culture born from what its admirers call TCAP, from the online clones to the Crime-Con audiences that cheer Hansen as he shows clips from his current show, Takedown. One faux-Hansen admits to having his staff impersonate cops, because YouTube will remove segments if police aren’t present in them. (We believe that’s a crime as well?) His attempts to replicate To Catch a Predator and brand himself as a broadcast-ready vigilante couldn’t be more amateurish, but hey, he gets clicks, so…. This, as much as the actual justice that gets served, is the show’s legacy. Take the law into your own hands. Just make sure the camera is rolling.
Osit eventually secures a sitdown with Hansen himself, and Predators builds to a one-on-one between the director and the host that feels less a hot-seat “gotcha” interview and more like an earnest attempt to untangle the moral queasiness behind it all. “Help me understand” is a common phrase that Hansen uses, and that need to get at the “why” behind these men taking the bait is one of the reasons Osit became fixated on TCAP. He wants Hansen to explain, if he can, the justification behind a recent Takedown installment that busted an 18-year-old kid. Eventually, the two end up in a rhetorical draw, at which point Osit tells Hansen, “You’re free to go.” The movie doesn’t end with answers, only more dangling questions. It’s still an absolutely fascinating watch. The doc currently remains without a distributor. Someone needs to snatch this up ASAP.
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