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In Portland the ACLU forced the city to stop arresting pimps of underage children as they were arresting black males out of proportion to the local population (ie, 5% blacks in Portland, but 95% of the pimps are black).
So the question is, are stings legal, entrapment or profiling?
Let's see here..........95% of the model citizens pimping off CHILDREN are black, so we cannot stop more kids from being ruined foor life because of PC?
Stings are there to stem the tide of this terrible practice...............
Those scumbags are breaking the law if that matters.[/quote]
I think the Philippine President's advice on certain criminal behavior is apt here. Neighborhood stings en masse would do wonders to snuff out the trash preying upon the vulnerable.
If a "Police" sting involves disguising themselves as a vulnerable target for a crime and the criminal act is committed, I'm all for some Davis, Sweet, Astrachan and Grimes action under those conditions. In that scenario, you are making society a better place for all. Too bad if it reduces work load for penal industry.
Let's see here..........95% of the model citizens pimping off CHILDREN are black, so we cannot stop more kids from being ruined foor life because of PC?
Stings are there to stem the tide of this terrible practice...............
Those scumbags are breaking the law if that matters.
It is not remotely possible that 95% of pimps of underage CHILDREN are black in the entire country. In Portland where there are maybe less than 10,000 black men of all ages and socio-economic levels in a population of 635,000 it is beyond all calculable possibility that a majority of the men involved in human trafficking are black. Is there such a palpable need to equate black men with crime? Even crimes with historically low black involvement? In the 70's for about a decade there was a pimp culture in urban areas of adult black women. Underage children are the prey of Eastern Europeans and Asians, then and now. If police stings are really turning up a majority of black men it would surprise me. Then again, it shouldn't. I once lived in a town of 30,000 with a black population so small that all of us could have fit comfortably in a standard city bus. I was pulled over for various traffic offenses two or three times a month. Most times I was let go after a 30 minute check for outstanding warrants. Other times I had to go to traffic court. Only once in all that time did I see someone white waiting for their turn before the judge.
What's there to debate? The purpose of law enforcement is to both enforce current laws and prevent laws from being broken. Stings are set up to catch people who are looking to engage in some illegal activity. If you're not interested in buying dope, using a prostitute, buying stolen merchandise, avoiding paying sales taxes, hiring a "hitman", etc, how are you going to get trapped in a sting even if you stumble into one? Just because the owner of a local video store has a collection of kiddie porn he rents out to his "select clientele" doesn't mean that anybody or everybody who comes in to rent Star Wars or Casablanca or Teenage Ninja Turtles is going to be arrested.
In Portland the ACLU forced the city to stop arresting pimps of underage children as they were arresting black males out of proportion to the local population (ie, 5% blacks in Portland, but 95% of the pimps are black).
I can't find any links about this. Can you supply some links so I can read up on it?
"Government agents may not originate a criminal design, implant in an innocent person's mind the disposition to commit a criminal act, and then induce commission of the crime so that the Government may prosecute."
Postal inspectors spent 26 MONTHS inducing a man in Nebraska to purchase child pornography. It was an egregious example of US Governmental prosecutorial overreach. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that it was entrapment.
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While I would agree that enticing someone for 26 months to commit a crime should constitute entrapment, that term "an innocent person's mind" is interesting. If a person responds to a simple ad for sex with a minor and then goes to meet that minor for sex, I would argue that isn't "an innocent person's mind".
So in summation, the time element and maybe even the amount of effort goes in determining entrapment or not.
I can't find any links about this. Can you supply some links so I can read up on it?
I found the articles about the arrest, but was unable to find on the sting being stopped. Probably because I watched it on the local news on TV. I am surprised I cannot locate a better article. What they did say was that the ACLU found the arrest to be "racial profiling" as the percentage of arrestees was out of proportion to the general population of black males. So they stopped the operation. That said, if a pimp is arrested individually, then all bets are off and he goes to jail.
While I would agree that enticing someone for 26 months to commit a crime should constitute entrapment, that term "an innocent person's mind" is interesting. If a person responds to a simple ad for sex with a minor and then goes to meet that minor for sex, I would argue that isn't "an innocent person's mind".
Exactly. It wouldn't matter if you solicited me one time or one hundred times to invest in child porn or any other illegal activity. My answer would still be NO.
Let's just wonder how many "innocent people being entrapped" by stings would think twice about it if they saw on the news every day of another person being arrested by sting operations?
It sends a very clear message that you are being watched. Someone sitting on the fence may decide to climb back off and stay in their own back yard. Those that continue on down that dark path are most likely the one's you want out of society.
We are watched virtually every where we go as it is. Why not watch would be criminals and catch them before they put some one else in harms way? Especially if it saves an innocent child.
Imagine if it was your child that was snagged by some predator and forced to perform. I wonder how many of you would change your mind about sting operations if it had prevented your child from becoming a victim? Try to make it a little more real in your universe and see if you still feel the same way.
Sorry but I have no sympathy for people caught doing nefarious deeds. Get them out of society any way you can.
After the pedophile sting controversy on Dateline, now MSN has picked up on another controversy involving male homosexuals in LA. In Portland the ACLU forced the city to stop arresting pimps of underage children as they were arresting black males out of proportion to the local population (ie, 5% blacks in Portland, but 95% of the pimps are black).
So the question is, are stings legal, entrapment or profiling?
I'm confused by your statements. What does the racial makeup of pimps in Portland have to do with whether sings are "legal, entrapment, or profiling?"
So I'll ignore the race baiting and go right to the actual question.
A sting is when police units go undercover into an existing criminal organization, gather evidence over time, then make a series of arrests all at the same time.
Entrapment is a legal term where someone wouldn't have committed a crime if a member of the police force hadn't coerced it. For example, say a women is minding her own business in a bar when a cute undercover officer starts hitting on her. After she agrees to a hookup, he offers cash and she accepts. That's entrapment. Stings are the infiltration of an existing criminal organization, so by definition they are not entrapment.
Profiling is when police agencies (or anyone) uses race or some other metric to selectively enforce laws. For example, if 10% of the drivers in the area are black but black drivers get 60% of the traffic stops, that's likely profiling. Unless the police only went after black-run pedophile rings while ignoring the white-runs ones, this isn't profiling either.
No one said they weren't legal. The question, as I understood it, is: should they be allowed, i.e. are they an ethical practice? IMO no. And this has only a little to do with profiling. Black men are not huge consumers of child porn. Technically I shouldn't care if white and Asian men are being hauled in from child porn stings. But I do. Its wrong. There are enough sicko child porn addicts that should be taken into custody without randomly sending kiddie porn to innocent men who didn't ask for it to see what they will do. That might be called a sting operation but I call it entrapment. And there is no reason that stings cannot be combined with profiling as in a sting operation that hauls in a mixed bag of perpetrators and then the operators single out the racial minorities to actually prosecute. There is more than enough real crime going on to keep legitimate police operations busy 24/7. There should never be a need to manufacture malfeasance by the use of entrapment tactics. The suspects collected via this means are low hanging fruit that real law enforcement jurisdictions should be ashamed to prosecute.
Blazer and Bill790 are the only two that touched on the actual difference between entrapment and a lawful sting.
I used to run stings for everything from narcotics to contract murder. (Never did prostitution, though.)
The agent must prove 'predisposition' before carrying out a sting. That means the presumptive offender must initiate the conduct, whether in the event for which he was arrested or in some previous event. If you cannot prove predisposition, you will either lose at trial or at appeal. (In my world, you wouldn't even get the case into court.)
If you sell drugs to one of my informants, that's evidence that you are predisposed to sell drugs. I can approach you and ask you to sell them to me. If you then sell drugs to me, congratulations! You just won an all-expenses paid trip to the hoosgow.
If I advertise that I sell drugs and you contact me out of the blue, fly to Miami and accept the pound of coke I have to offer, I get to arrest you for trafficking. (And a gun charge for the revolver I took out of your waistband.)
Since so much of this thread deals with prostitution and other 'morality' charges, it is important to understand that under US law, if the Supreme Court allows an investigative technique to be used for one type of criminal offense, then its use is legitmate for all criminal offenses. Some jurisdictions limit stings to felonies or some other category of crime, or they have policies that limit the use of stings in lesser offenses (like prostitution). Usually that is because sting operations are both dangerous and expensive. But that is a local policy decision, not a legal ruling.
So that's the way they are supposed to work, and the reasons why. Have fun with the rest of the debate...
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Exactly. It wouldn't matter if you solicited me one time or one hundred times to invest in child porn or any other illegal activity. My answer would still be NO. 