Mark Bowden VF piece: "A Crime of Shadows"

Just got around to reading this piece from last month, and wasn't sure where to put it, Sports and News, Anything Goes, or Journalism. Feel free to move if appropriate.

Anyway, excellent, compelling piece on a "To Catch a Predator"-style sting operation in a Philly burb that is worth sharing. The perpetrator swears that he was just trying to rope the woman into sex, not her two "daughters," but playing along to bed the woman alone before fleeing. Bowden buys it and I'm pretty sure I do, too.

Bowden raises the interesting issue about whether authorities are really taking dangerous criminals off the street or simply baiting harmless people. Well worth the read - the cop in the piece certainly is the aggressor a lot of the time. One of the best magazine pieces I've read this year, and probably one of the most important.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/sexual-predators-200912

 

Most of the "To Catch A Predator" people have struck me as more stupid than dangerous ... but there have been some downright scary ones. Like the guy who walked into the house and got naked.

If a few stupid ones have to get caught in the dragnet, fine by me.

 

Considering most sexual predators victimize people they know, the hysteria created by these dragnets and shows like Catch a Predator is ridiculous. Bowden's story was outstanding, though I doubt it will have any effect on these types of operations. Rolling Stone and Esquire had really good stories picking apart Dateline and the group they worked with, but the stranger danger myth is too powerful, especially when coupled with scary, sexually explicit emails.