By Steve Yoder . . . On July 8, 2018, Norman Achin, then a 50 year-old public school teacher living in Northern Virginia, signed up for the adults-only dating app Grindr. Two days later, he was contacted by someone calling himself AlexVA. Soon after they started talking, AlexVA told Achin that he was 14 years old. “I was looking for adult fun. Did not expect to run into your age,” Achin responded through the app on July 12. “Not interested in that kind of relationship with a boy.” The next day, he reported AlexVA to Grindr for violating its terms of use, and Grindr suspended AlexVA’s account.
In reality, AlexVA was a police officer in the Fairfax County Police Department who had been communicating with a number of men on Grindr as part of an undercover investigation.
On July 22, Achin sent a nude photo to the suspended AlexVA account—he says he doesn’t know how it happened and that he’d been communicating with other Grindr users, all adults. Achin had made similar mistakes before. On July 12, he’d sent texts intended for another adult user to AlexVA. AlexVA responded but didn’t tell Achin that he had the wrong person until they’d been exchanging messages for several hours. Achin apologized.
“You want something with an adult” he texted to AlexVA. “That’s a bad idea. Don’t you see?”
Despite Achin’s apparent efforts to dissuade AlexVA from seeking sex with adults, he was arrested on July 23, and in May 2019 a Fairfax County judge found him guilty of using a communications device to solicit a minor.
State records show Achin had no prior criminal history, nor did the prosecutor introduce evidence at trial that he’d ever sexually abused children or possessed child pornography. Still, Achin was sentenced to seven months in prison and was put on the state’s sex offender registry. He lost his job teaching at a public school and his pension. He now has a retail job and does gig work to make ends meet and pay off thousands of dollars of legal debt, he says.
Achin’s arrest was part of a bigger trend in policing. From 2018 to 2020, law enforcement agencies across the country launched almost 2,500 such “proactive” sting investigations. These investigations are carried out by special task forces funded by the federal government as part of a national strategy to prosecute online sex crimes against children. (2020 is the last year for which data is available for most task forces.)
However, the law enforcement agencies that run these task forces receive funding based in part on how many arrests and convictions they get. This may create an incentive to pursue fictitious-victim sting operations, which are often cheaper and less time-intensive than investigations of crimes with real victims. But experts on child trafficking say it’s unclear how many crimes against children these stings actually prevent, and the federal government hasn’t looked into whether the money spent on these task forces is actually keeping kids from being victimized.
Read the full piece here at The Appeal.
The answer is no…they wouldn’t have jobs without crimes anyway so now they have to invent crimes. The system is bloated, everyone is getting their share of the “prevention pie”. They do absurd “toy drives” and other forms of community integration. Those functions and programs all paid for with tax paper dollars, and to what end?
So that they can say “Hey look kids, cops shop at Walmart too!”. Why not take the money and give it to the kids instead of funneling it through a police state system? Or better yet, help the families who get their lives torn apart as the new victims of the system?
No? Well then that “prevention” has some steep costs associated with it that nobody cares to account for and many just turn a blind eye to. But as tax payers we’ll keep getting the bill.
Agreed, the answer is no. Although the SMART (Sentencing, Monitoring, Apprehending, Registering, and Tracking) office might have a research report on that, like they have on the inefficacy of residency restrictions.
There could be some value in community integration programs, especially now when many people hide at home and do almost all business online. People should have opportunities to meet their neighbors, even the police, to see they are just people like themselves.
Cops should not mis represent themselves in cyberspace when the alledged crime didn’t happen
The cops should be held accountable for the mis leading portion and they should be put behind bars in America for entrapping the Americans into committing a crime
In 2018 Northwestern university conducted a study of young gay males ages 14-18 about adult gay hook up sites online to men meet men ages 18 and over and you guessed it, these young men who look 18 plus lie to get on these sites to hook up fit in and find guys like themselves. EVEN though they lie to get on site an FCC crime, if you as adult should hook up with these minors, you will be prosecuted! No hope in Ny state as they don’t protect decent men who may be searching for sex but not predators! Redefine predators and teaching in High school the dangers if they should meet a nefarious individual seeking to harm Gays ! Children n parents mind the internet safeguards, stop copping out!