.
A lot can change in a year.
If anyone should be able to relate to that, it is Connor Bevins.
He was best known in April 2018 as the Palmy Creep Catcher, on a quest to keep Palmerston North's children safe from sexual predators.
He laid traps online, luring alleged paedophiles into public so he could confront, film and expose them.
Connor Bevins stands in the Palmerston North District Court dock, not long after he was charged with making harmful digital communications in relation to his creep catching escapades. himself.
Bevins shielded his face as he was sentenced in the Palmerston North District Court on Wednesday to two years and eight months in jail for offences under the Harmful Digital Communications Act.
It is the harshest penalty since the act became law in 2015.
His victims and their family watched from the public gallery as his lawyer told the court how Bevins had struggled to live with himself since his arrest.
One of his victims had died in a suspected suicide and others had called crisis helplines, the court heard.
Judge Jim Large said Bevins' actions were vindictive, cruel and premeditated, and vilified innocent people on social media, the most public forum on the internet.
"You decided what you thought they were. You were effectively judge, jury and executioner.
"Vigilante law in New Zealand is not how our law works. Paedophiles are people who offend against children. The person you were reporting to be was far from a child."
In a letter read to the court, Bevins said he thought about this victims each day.
"I can't imagine what they have been through... I want to say sorry."
All his offending took place in less than a month, all spawned from a strong motive – preventing people ending up like himself.
When interviewed by Stuff in April 2018, Bevins said he was a victim of sexual abuse.
His life was going well before he started Palmy Creep Catchers – he had a job and a girlfriend – but things fell apart because he never properly dealt with his past.
"I just kept having that thought in my head because I didn't talk to anyone about it."
He took notice of the Surrey Creep Catchers, a Canadian group formed with the aim of outing alleged paedophiles.
Bevins followed the Surrey model, making fake profiles on dating apps and websites such as NZ Dating and Grindr, posing as an underage child despite the apps and websites requiring users to be 18 or older.
He arranged to meet the people he matched with, picking places such as parks, shopping malls and fast food restaurants.
He filmed every encounter, hitting record while walking to the meeting spot and giving a description of the target.
He was always brief and to the point when he shoved the camera in his target's face.
"Hi I'm Palmy Creep Catchers and you're here to meet an underage girl for sex."
Things then went one of two ways. Either the target would take off, or they would talk.
If they ran, Bevins chased them, telling them he had chat logs of what was said between the "minor" and the target. Occasionally, he verbally abused them.
He yelled at bystanders, saying he was "Palmy Creep Catchers" and the man he was following was a paedophile.
Videos ended with him uttering "you're done, bruv", a riff on Surrey group's catchphrase: "Yer done, bud".
The videos were posted to YouTube and a Facebook page Bevins set up.
The Facebook page, deleted soon after his arrest in April 2018, attracted hundreds of comments, likes and followers.
The comments consisted of people tagging their friends, outing the alleged paedophiles, messages of support for Bevins' crusade and, occasionally, someone saying he should leave it to police.
Catching was a vexing process for Bevins.
"I don't want to be a vigilante. I just want these people down."
Police told him his methods did not meet their strict standards, but he was adamant he had to keep going.
But he did no research into the best way to "catch", or even if it was legal.
He was willing to go to jail, boasting he would get someone to take up the moniker of Palmy Creep Catcher while he was inside.
No Palmy Creep Catchers material has appeared online – apart from a meme page, complete with downloadable cellphone ring tones inspired by Bevins – since his arrest.
All his videos courted controversy,
Published as a two-part video, it showed Bevins meeting a person with a brain injury in The Plaza shopping mall in Palmerston North.
It is an awkward, painful encounter to watch, starting in the food court and moving to the car park.
All the way through the target talks, and talks, and talks.
Bevins keeps asking questions, keeps the conversation flowing. The camera keeps rolling.
Bevins called himself the Palmy Creep Catcher during his misguided pedophile hunting crusade, and often lured his targets to The Square, in the middle of the city.
He copped a lot of flack on his Facebook page, people arguing over if it was right to show a clearly ill person in that light.
As Bevins continued his crusade, his tactics changed.
People started joining him on stings, most of them wearing shirts emblazoned with "Anti-P Ministry" and armed with smartphones capable of video.
One night-time encounter resulted in Bevins nearly being dragged by a car down the road, after he opened the front passenger's door of a target's vehicle and put his foot inside.
He and his crew would try to take car keys from targets while saying they were under citizen's arrest.
He took his crusade to Taupō for arguably his most dangerous encounter.
The video begins with someone standing behind a car in a driveway. Bevins is at the front.
He announces themselves as non-violent vigilantes. They claim they are placing the person in the car under citizen's arrest.
As the driver tries to escape, Bevins jumps on the bonnet, saying: "I'm not scared".
His tone soon changes, his breathing indicating someone suddenly realising they are in trouble.
He makes deep throaty screams as the car drives down the road. His focus goes from capture to survival, as he begs the driver to stop.
The driver complies, giving Bevins and an associate a chance to go for the car keys.
The target once again accelerates, dragging Bevins a few metres down the road before taking off around the corner.
It was the last of his stings, with police arresting him soon after.
Crown prosecutor Joshua Harvey said Bevins deliberately set out to humiliate his targets and disguised his crusade as if it was a public service.
It was a vile scheme, which entrapped innocent people who had good reason to believe Bevins was not underage, he said.
"This is a man who tried to make a name for himself."
Evidence: the available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid – Oxford Dictionary
While Bevins' stings resulted in no criminal charges against the people he targeted, Surrey Creep Catchers' evidence has been used in Canadian courts.
Surrey Creep Catchers' president Ryan Laforge told Global News in 2018 it was "a breath of fresh air" to see their evidence used.
But that air has since soured, as the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in March it was wrong to expect a defendant in a child-luring case to prove the person they were talking to was legally old enough.
The court said it was unconstitutional to shift the burden of proof to a defendant, so prosecutors now need to prove the accused believed the person was underage.
There are fears convictions secured using Surrey Creep Catchers footage will be quashed as a result.
Meanwhile, Laforge and another member of the group have pleaded guilty to assaulting people during stings.
Laforge has also been slapped with defamation suits in relation to his activities.
But Bevins and Laforge are not the only creep catchers.
The movement is global, but most popular in the United Kingdom and North America.
There have been previous cases in New Zealand too, with an Auckland group doing similar stings in early-2018 before soon shutting down.
Awareness of the issue of child sex abuse had grown considerably in the past 15 years, making people think of how to combat it.
"As people are more aware, outrage grows," Bradley said.
Creep catchers use that awareness and outrage to justify their actions, something Bradley described as a "technique of rationalisation".
Catching was not based on the prevalence of a crime, but on the symbolic nature of how awful sexual abuse against children was, he said.
Bevins told Stuff he believed police did not put enough time into "stuff like this", driving him to take action.
"What if I didn't meet up with these guys and it was an actual underage kid, whose innocence could have been taken?
"That's what scares me."
While Bevins' activity was illegal and escalated, Bradley said he was not as dangerous as some overseas groups.
People have nearly been set on fire in the UK and driven out of their homes in other countries, he said.
Groups in Russia beat people, sometimes fatally, for not only alleged paedophilia, but being part of the LGBTQI+ community.
But it was the rise of technology – the internet, smartphones, dating websites and apps – that truly enabled the catching movement, Bradley said.
People like Bevins would have no idea how to find alleged paedophiles, take videos of their stings, then share them with a wide audience, without modern technology.
"Without social media networks, these types of activities simply wouldn't be possible," Bradley said.
The catching movement fed into the wider debate about controlling content on the internet, with pressure going on social media companies following the live-streaming of the Christchurch terror attacks in March, he said.
"Who makes the decisions? Who moderates content? Who moderates behaviour?"
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by marshmallow
