A PAEDOPHILE hunter group would consider working with police in future but warned any such move needs to benefit those on both sides.
Parents Against Paedophiles, whose members pose online as children then film the people they meet before handing them over to officers, has said it would be happy to sit around a table with South Yorkshire Police to discuss working together but would need assurance the force wouldn’t impinge its efforts to snare suspected perverts.
The Barnsley group’s founder spoke to the Chronicle after the UK’s lead police officer on child protection, Chief Constable Simon Bailey, said forces may have to look at working with such vigilante groups in the future. He made the comment after figures obtained by the BBC showed an increase in the number of cases where evidence gathered by paedophile hunters is being used, up from 11 per cent in 2014 to 44 per cent in 2016.
CC Bailey said such vigilante groups are ‘putting the lives of children at risk’ telling the BBC: “I’m not going to condone these groups and I would encourage them all to stop, but I recognise that I am not winning that conversation.”
When asked whether police could work with vigilantes, he said: “I think that’s something we’re going to have to potentially have to look at, yes, but it comes with some real complexity.”
The Barnsley group was set up by concerned parents in March this year.
The founder, who wishes to remain anonymous in order to protect the work of the group, told the Chronicle it had helped secure several convictions in the six months it has been active.
He said: “We are currently standing at six convictions and have got two on remand and are waiting for one court date and we’ve just got another.
“The only thing we are worried about if it comes to working with police is we feel if we had to enter into a formal partnership it could impinge on our work.
“It needs to benefit both groups.
“We have always said from day one we’re happy working with the police just that we don’t want to be stopped doing how we do it.
“We don’t do it to cause trouble. We do it because we have a firm belief everyone has a right to know who these people are.
“We’d be happy to sit around a table and discuss it if it was moving in that direction.
“If we started working together rather than against each other we could take more people of the streets.”
He said the police has concerns with how the group collects evidence and has been told they are endangering investigations and putting people at risk by carrying out ‘stings’ to catch people.
But he said if that was the case, the police wouldn’t use the evidence they supply to help secure convictions.
“The bottom line is if you are using our evidence and get convictions and are putting people in prison what’s the point in stopping us?” he told the Chronicle. “They are already putting people away with the work we are doing.
“In the long run two things will happen - they will work with us or carry on as they are and try and hamper us.”
