Perverse Incentives or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet Part 2

In this episode of 'Deviants' with Danny and Zurc, the hosts discuss the contrasting approaches to policing in the UK and US. They delve into Bonnie Burkhart's book 'Manufacturing Criminals,' which criticizes the US for incentivizing arrests over crime prevention through organizations like the ICAC Task Force. The episode highlights how these perverse incentives can cause victims to turn on other victims, creating a destructive cycle. Through comparisons between vigilante actions and law enforcement tactics in both countries, the hosts emphasize the need for primary prevention and support systems to address unresolved childhood trauma. They argue for a public health approach to reduce abuse and advocate for better, more compassionate resources to help prevent potential crimes.

Transcript

Zurc: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to Deviants with Danny and Zurc. Last week we ended the discussion with my observation that in the UK the police don't pretend to be children to catch criminals. Danny had brought up that the legislation states that the courts must prevent the state from prosecuting state created crime.

We'll continue this discussion with the introduction of Bonnie Burkhart's book Manufacturing Criminals. Enjoy. And now the conclusion of perverse incentives or how I learned to stop worrying and love the internet.

We got this book. Okay. We got this book that was published by this woman here in the us. Her name is Bonnie Burkhart. Okay. And she published this book called Manufacturing Criminals. And you're saying state created crime. That's the name of her book. And it came out recently, it's called Manufacturing Criminals, fourth Amendment Decay in the Electronic Age.

She alleges that there's these practices of [00:01:00] this organization called the Internet Crimes Against Children ICAC Task Force. Okay. And these impersonation tactics and investigative shortcuts. That manufacture crime and inflate arrests, statistics and the grant structures reward volume. Okay?

So the money where the money is going, it rewards volume. That means more arrests equals lots more funding. So whether you agree or not, her critique speaks to these sort of perverse incentives. These overtones of perversion that can grow when the metric is arrests and not prevention.

I know Bonnie a bit. I've talked to her before and she is a wonderful person. You would never expect her to be the one that gets up on the stage. 'cause she's a Midwestern. Woman [00:02:00] Lutheran, very proper.

And she's talking about these sex offenses and she gets up on that stage and man, she just takes it away. It's sight to see. And her organization, one standard of justice works at the policy level addressing these issues with these sex offense laws and this void of restorative justice when it comes to something so intimate to the human experience, our sexuality.

Another voice I wanna point out here in the US that's talking about, this is somebody that, that she often works with Stephen Coker. Who is quite handsome? Danny, I just saw a picture of Steven Coker and I

that wasn't expecting that. Expecting Steven Coker is actually, He's attractive.

He's an attractive man. And that was unexpected. He works for Coker Forensics and he's a digital forensics expert. So he looks at the computers and he's testified in these criminal cases [00:03:00] and including child exploitation matters, and, his work is, I can tell he has a lot of integrity and is able to figure out exactly what the life cycle of the data that is being used to convict.

Some, someone looks what is that? Where, when was it created? When was it accessed? When was it deleted? And it's interesting to see, 'cause you got Bonnie who's like the, this very intelligent math, proper Lutheran person. And then you got Steven, who's like this computer nerd and handsome and you put 'em together in, in a room together and they've done some really interesting work and exposing how US law enforcement is rewarding volume over prevention, and it's this prevention vacuum.

Okay. Where I feel like I just have to, in my country, and I think you might too, have a [00:04:00] similar. Experience maybe with drugs more. But the uncomfortable truth is that the US pours more money into these stings and incarceration. 

Danny: Yeah. Yeah. but comparatively very little into primary prevention, especially services for people seeking help before they offend.

Zurc: They don't want to hurt children. They don't want to look at the things that they're looking at. They are stuck because they were hurt as a child and they weren't ever able to get help. And the mainstream reporting and CDC materials say the evidence base for prevention is actually really underdeveloped.

And federal support in the US has been really limited. It's sad because we're talking about, again, we're talking about people with disabilities, we're talking about parents, we're talking about people who are L-G-B-T-Q who have been through a lot of [00:05:00] adversity. We've made it really easy for these people to get arrested and we've made it really hard for them to get help.

And if the policy goal is fewer victims and fewer crimes, which I think really that should be our focus. Okay. Not more arrests, but fewer victims and fewer crimes. A public health approach with maybe an anonymous evidence-based service. To stand alongside law enforcement to get people help.

Maybe some deescalation, some intervention, some trauma-informed therapy, alongside targeted law enforcement. Okay. Would really save us a, just a ton of money. Maybe we could give some teachers some raises. Okay. Have better educational materials in the schools.

Danny: Yeah. Yeah. 

In the uk, as I said, the intervention of police in this sort of activity [00:06:00] is less common, I think, than the us. What's happened here is that we've also had people with their own agendas, and I know this happens both sides of the Atlantic. You've got guys like Gordon Flowers famously, going around 

Zurc: oh yeah. People vs. Preds

Danny: yeah. Yeah. The pedo hunters. And , in North America or certainly in the United States there's nothing really standing in their way. They can go on ahead and,

Zurc: Not really. No. We just had 24 people arrested in a nearby city to where I live just a couple of weeks ago. 24 from people preds making the child accounts. Yep.

Danny: Yeah. The, and they exist this this side of the Atlantic as well. I think the case that comes to mind is the Crown versus tl, which was quite recently compared to the rest of the legislation since, someone caught by a pedo [00:07:00] hunter known as tl appealed against conviction saying that they were entrapped and ensnared by the citizen vigilante and their appeal failed in the high court or in the supreme court. .

And that changed a lot as well.

Zurc: So in the UK you do have, something similar happening it's just not funded by federal dollars

Danny: the constraints on law enforcement I think are, far tighter in the uk, but for private citizens, for a stay of prosecution, the private citizens conduct must be quote, so serious that it would be an affront on the public conscience for the state to rely on the evidence that they collected.

Zurc: It is an affront to my conscience when they target, people that have had concerns about their sexual behavior and couldn't get help.

Danny: Yeah. And the key test for that, the [00:08:00] private citizen's conduct must be quote, grossly, mis conducted, and seriously improper if it's to justify a stay of prosecution. 

Zurc: Once you get outted or exposed, or whatever you wanna call it, you get labeled by other people as a pedophile or whatever. Your life is effectively over you can't get a job, you can't you can't be seen in

public. Everybody knows who you are because people who have really good intentions in so far as they wanna protect kids go outta their way to learn who these people are but what they're actually doing is, really terrorizing people, and it's, it's not actually protecting kids because one of the things that I noticed, and I haven't mentioned, I don't know if I've mentioned this yet before, but all of these policies that we've been talking about around the entrapment and, vigilantes and all those... this has become our norm. This has become [00:09:00] our normal. And in the meantime, over the past 15, 20 years, the amount of child sexual abuse material, the number of children that are exploited online has exploded. Okay. Exponentially in both of our countries and in Canada. And it's really sad, okay? Because if you're a kid like I was, and you remember being a kid that was going and doing things inappropriate online, okay? It's like, I experience a lot of sadness and it's not about what happened to me.

It's about I know that some of the things that I did. Maybe some of the content that I recorded as a child of myself Okay. Is Now used to arrest people. It's used in courts. It's used in our legal system to destroy people's lives. And when I was a kid, I was doing something that wasn't [00:10:00] healthy and I needed help, couldn't get help because there's no primary prevention resources.

And now I have to live with that and it's just, it's really hard. It's like I have to live with that. But I was a kid and that's a hard thing for me. And I don't think any child should have to carry that burden.

Danny: Oh no, of course not.

Zurc: Yeah. I.

Danny: Have you watch the stuff that's on sites like YouTube that covers the stings made by private citizens or private investigators, or pedo hunters, or whatever you want to call them, the people that they are after. Are almost invariably extremely vulnerable themselves.

I would say that most of them have themselves been victims of abuse,

Zurc: I would say so too. 

Danny: Of and most the Pedo Hunters have their own, agenda in that respect.

Zurc: Yeah.

Danny: We've got victims [00:11:00] tracking down and outing victims. It is 

Zurc: yep. 

Danny: sad.

Zurc: It's a reinforcement cycle. That is actually facilitating dangerous people who are perpetrators, who are doing this under the radar, who are very dangerous people. People like my grandfather, there is a level of horror that people can get to where they justify behavior around, with children.

That's like horrifying. Okay. And it's just those people are actually facilitated by this victims going after victims thing because it makes it easy to fly under the radar. You know that, oh, well you're not one of the targeted people. 'cause nobody can tell you're not doing any of these things that they're entrapping on. So nobody can tell. So you're never gonna get caught. So they feel they have complete license to just, tear through people's [00:12:00] lives. And , make no mistake, there are people like that out there. There are also people that I really respect, like law enforcement agencies, like the FBI and all this they're catching those people and that's super important.

That is desperately needed work to protect kids like I was. But this thing where we conflate that work with, victims, catching victims and vigilante and police pretending to be children on social media, that's gotta stop man. We as a society, we need to do better on this because I didn't even mention this earlier, when the police go on there and the vigilantes go on there to the social medias and they create these fake child accounts.

Y'all that is training the machine learning algorithm in the backend to send what appears to be Children advertising for groups, pages, and friends. For people that have [00:13:00] risky sexual behavior online, that's what we're doing. So when a real child signs up, they get these recommended friends and recommended groups and recommended pages that are based on the behavior of adults who are pretending to be children.

Danny: Oh no it's very scary. And it comes back to, what I talked about in the in the video I did about the Age of consent. It's, it is putting it all into this adversarial context of criminal law. I think, I'm thinking back to, I mentioned earlier the Crown versus tl, which was 

Zurc: yeah.

Danny: a case in 2018, if I remember correctly, and.

This was, yeah, an argument that went from court to the Supreme Court that, um, argued that the defendant TL had been caught by vigilante, posing as a 14-year-old girl in a [00:14:00] chat room who'd made suggestions that he wanted to have sexual contact with her. And that resulted in an arrangement for a meeting, which is, that's automatically an offense, which is commonly called grooming.

And, uh, you know, the original judge in the grand court granted a stay of prosecution, so more or less dismissed the case because, uh, the, he said that the vigilante had acted like a, a, an internet police force and incited the, but the high court reversed that and said that although the vigilantes active actions were proactive.

And arguably improper the threshold for entrapment by a citizen rather than a law enforcement officer was gross misconduct. Yeah. And the vigilante had merely presented an opportunity that the defendant freely took. Now the [00:15:00] defendants, I'm pretty sure had their own issues, was probably a victim of abuse themselves. 

Yeah. The vigilante was probably a victim of abuse given that they were motivated to go to all that, that problem, to seek out people who were grooming kids online.

Zurc: Yeah. 

Danny: The argument to me shouldn't be about whether or not that person is prosecuted and punished. It should be about why all three parties in this should suffer and continue to suffer.

Zurc: Yeah. God, thank you man. I, that is really why, okay. We all know that there are bad people out there that are dangerous, okay? Like my grandfather, okay? And we all know that they exist. But let's not be on a [00:16:00] campaign to paint people like that because they have unresolved trauma from their childhood.

When we're talking about unresolved trauma, It can look really scary. It can look like my grandfather.

But it's not, it's definitely not. And it's very important that we have experts involved who can, measure that and figure out what's going on? Is it the unresolved trauma situation or is it this person's dangerous we really need to separate them. And we have experts who have that training. We gotta utilize them.

We have people like myself, when I was a kid, I couldn't get help. Like there was nowhere for me to go. So we are missing something in terms of evaluation, in terms of like assessment. And then we're also missing something in terms of intervention.

And then we're also missing something in terms of long-term protective care for [00:17:00] people and therapeutic resources. When it comes to this sexual behavior, sexual thoughts and things like that. And I don't think, Danny, that sexual trauma is the only kind of trauma that can lead to maladaptive sexual behavior.

Any kind of unresolved trauma from your childhood, any kind of unresolved childhood trauma is, a common denominator when you look at all the people that are getting arrested, right? All of them seem to have a lot of unresolved childhood trauma.

it's just when you have the vigilantes who also have unresolved childhood trauma going after these people, it's a nightmare. And we don't wanna be in a nightmare anymore. We wanna wake up and we wanna make it so people can get help. We wanna stop spending so much money on [00:18:00] keeping people in prison for a really long time when they just needed help.

And instead take all that money. And we want to put it towards our teachers. We want to put it towards our community centers. We want to put it towards our, roads, our infrastructure. We want to put it towards housing people who are disabled

Danny: Put, we wanna put educating kids on how to themselves safe as well.

Zurc: We wanna put it towards educating kids and, and learning about this and understanding how to talk about it so that instead of just calling everybody that looks suspicious on the internet, a pedophile, and then not telling anyone what you're doing alone at night. Uh, you know, we can instead talk about how there's no primary prevention and primary prevention is a good thing, and we can define it and we can talk

Danny: I'm just checking on up online at the term, it's hard to find reliable data on this, but, there was a BBC, [00:19:00] freedom of Information request in 2018 while they were making a documentary that shows that in 2017 in the 12 months of 2017, about half of the prosecutions for the offense of meeting a child following sexual grooming.

Yeah. And there were only 302 of those in total. Yeah.

Zurc: 302.

Danny: country with a population of what? Around about in, in 2017, around about 62, 63 million. Yeah. 150. 150. So yeah, pretty much half Were from vigilante groups. Reports from vigilante groups. Yeah. So we've got the vigilantes who I mean, it's an assumption, but I think it's a reasonable one.

I think most of whom are [00:20:00] motivated by themselves being victims are working to get offenders in this, and most of whom I'm pretty convinced were victims themselves punished by the law. Yeah.

Zurc: Yeah. That is so destructive..

Danny: Recent police force data 2023. Police force statistics indicated that 90% of the evidence in cases of meeting a child following online sexual grooming came from hunter groups. So most nine outta 10 cases of prosecution now is coming from Pedo Hunters.

Zurc: Okay. So, Danny, do you remember in the first episode I told you my dad was sexually abused by his father. 

he told me he went through some sort of therapy when he found out what was [00:21:00] happening to me when I was a kid. His response was to tell me that he hated me. He got really angry at me. And I'm thinking about what you're saying right now about how we got the, victims, hurting victims. And that kind of, experience in my childhood just came to mind because my dad is a victim.

I am also a victim. We're victims of two different. Things, right? I'm a victim of sexual exploitation. He's a victim of sexual abuse. Those are actually, they are different and they're etiologies. Okay. And his response when he found out about me was to tell me that he hated me.

And I'm looking at what you're saying and I'm seeing a similar situation where it feels like something similar to that, doesn't it? 

Danny: Yeah, very much so. 

Zurc: Do you see what I'm saying? 

Danny: Yes.

Zurc: Yeah. And I wonder what that's, I wonder what that is. I think it [00:22:00] has to do partially, at least with the way that we talk about sexual harm and maladaptive sexual behavior.

It's like the people who are identified as victims prior to being identified as perpetrators. Are trained to hate the people that perpetrated 

Danny: Yeah. 

Zurc: It's programmed into them. But that's not therapy, that's not resolving trauma. That's programming somebody to hate someone. Hate is a strong drug. It feels good. Yeah, it feels so good. And takes everything and it leaves nothing. It does not actually accomplish anything.

Danny: Yeah. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I see this in a wider political context that, the way for a small minority to retain power and wealth is to get victims to hate one another.

We see this in terms of [00:23:00] race. 

Zurc: Mm, 

Danny: yeah. We see this terms of social class. 

Zurc: yeah. Mm 

Danny: Our enemies are people arriving on small boats in the uk.

Not the people arriving by private jet to oversee their golf courses. The enemy of the state is the minorities who are sexually and socially oppressed. It's not the 5% of the society that owns 90% of the property.

Zurc: And it's also not the 0.01% that are like my grandfather, where they're actually super dangerous people.

Danny: And let's not forget that the the president of the United States of America is a convicted sex offender.

Zurc: Oh my God. Is he though,

is he actually a convicted sex offender? Wait, hold up. Is he

Danny: I, oh, I don't think he is. No, I dunno for a fact, but yeah,

Zurc: Was it a civil [00:24:00] case or,

Danny: you'll have to look that up. I'm not sure, but yes,

Zurc: okay. I'm Googling it right now. Is Donald Trump a convicted sex offender? I don't know if that's true or 

Danny: my understanding is he is.

Zurc: PolitiFact, that seems legit. Will Donald Trump need to register as a sex offender? that was too many ads. Hold up. No, Trump is not required to register as a sex offender, as a result of being found liable in a civil trial. So you are saying he's a sex offender? It was a civil trial. It's just, I understand that you wanna hate on Trump, but he is the president of the United States and so I'm just gonna say I don't have any beef with the office of the president of the United States and currently that individual that occupies that office is clearly very, yeah, that's, I'm reading about this.

It's pretty bad, but Yikes. But I just wanna point out that he has issues with this too, clearly 

[00:25:00] sexual behavior, and I have a feeling he probably never was able to get help.

Danny: Yeah.

Zurc: There were no primary prevention resources available for him, and he's the president of the United States, since he's been able to make it as president, I want to believe that, he's one of these people that really needed help, when he was younger and didn't have anywhere to go.

And it has come up repeatedly throughout his life because of that. And I really feel like Donald Trump, president Trump, if you're listening to this, it would be great if if you could really emphasize the importance and value of primary prevention as a resource for people to get 

Danny: Absolutely. 

Zurc: do you think, Danny? You got any words for president?

Danny: I'm just saying it's, it's weird. Where British politicians are coming under fire because. They had a fleeting [00:26:00] encounter with Epstein. You know? 

Zurc: Mm. Yeah. 

Danny: We have a president who's been found guilty, albeit in a civil court, of sex crimes.

Zurc: This is a good opportunity, I think President Trump or others connected to President Trump to really, emphasize the value of primary prevention. 'cause none of that would've happened if there were resources available him to get

help when he was younger. He's a smart person. 

Danny: Is that gonna happen? Is that more important of me getting the the Nobel Peace Prize, which I was robbed off, although I 

Zurc: Yeah. Ooh. 

Danny: in one fell swoop.

Zurc: Okay. Well let's not quote all the ridiculous things. 'cause a lot of that is, it's appealing to his base and all of this nonsense. I wanna just narrow it down on onto the sexual behavior and sexual thoughts, or whatever you wanna call it. Like, if you just, if we could just narrow it down onto that, I really think a lot of that would've been avoided.

We [00:27:00] wouldn't be dealing with it. If he had had a way to get help now, he didn't have a way to get help, now we can identify it, but the people who are in power really need to do some hard thinking. And really need to do everything they can to listen to voices like my own, like survivors of this that have really done a lot of work to understand themselves and others.

Rather than just, bulldozing ahead without a perspective that's sound and, uh, compassionate and kind and gentle and seeks to, heal and not harm. And, we need to take a hard look at the incentives we built. We don't want volume. We don't want more people in prison. We want less abuse.

We want fewer victims. We want people to be able to get help before anybody is

hurt. Yep. And I'm zurc. [00:28:00] We got Danny and this is Deviants and we'll be back soon. Thank you for joining us.

Danny: Aye chucks, see ya later.

Zurc: And that was the conclusion of our two-part series on perverse incentives or how I learned to stop worrying and love the Internet. For those of you who have stuck with us to the end of this two-part series, I thought I'd tell you what the title of the series comes from. There was a movie that came out in 1964, Dr. Strange Love, or How I Learned to stop worrying and Love the Bomb. It was a political satire, black comedy film, co-written, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The film financed and released by Columbia Pictures was actually a co-production between the United States and the United Kingdom. And since Danny is in the United Kingdom and I'm in the United States, it seems like an interesting allusion to make. So I hope you enjoyed this two part series [00:29:00] and I look forward to recording more episodes, Danny, and I'll be back soon.

That's all folks.