I was a bit disquieted to walk down my street this evening and see this poster
taped to the wall. The poster (click for full version) gives the name and alias
of a man who may or may not be a sex offender:
PLEASE BEWARE
At this present time there is a preditor in our neighborhood [LES] He preys
on girls ages from 13–17. He is very cunning and manipulative. Please
talk to your daughters so they could be aware of this man. [NAME REDACTED]
It takes a whole community to stop men like him so lets all work together
to get him registered as a sex offender. We have to many children in this
neighbor so lets work collectively to keep our children safe! Thank you
There’s a lot here which makes me very uncomfortable, and I’m not talking about
the misspellings. For one thing, it feels like a call to vigilantism. I’ve explained
at length (in the comments here)
why I think it’s a very bad idea for sex-offender registries to be publicly
available.
What’s more, this guy has a common name: it’s entirely possible some entirely
unrelated person could get severely harrassed as a result of this poster. And
in what way can a community get someone registered as a sex offender in any
case? Can communities somehow vote on whether or not they think someone is a
sex offender? I thought you, well, needed to be convicted of something first.
As for talking to daughters about being aware of predators, well, that’s always
a good idea. It’s easy to find maps of sex offenders online, and there are already
eight registered sex offenders living in the East Village/Lower East Side. Let’s
teach our children to be safe, by all means. But let’s not start spilling red
ink on these people, lest we start spilling something else as a result.
And such good spelling too. This could definitely be the work of someone with an ax to grind against this person.
don’t the ny police have official warning/wanted/information posters that they put out? i know they do here in los – an official flier with description/information will be posted in the hood after a serious complaint or attack. this case seems to be encouraging slander and harrassment more than vilgilantism – this guy probably has a pretty good argument to file a complaint against whomever made the poster. then again, if he is causing trouble, now he might think twice and keep a lower profile. not saying it’s right, but it could be effective.
This looks like the work of Perverted Justice… familiar to many these days. The group that has been on Dateline. PJ isn’t really everything it appears to be – Here’s a group that has uncovered some pretty scary stuff about the vigilante group – Check it out at http://www.corrupted-justice.com