Police Trolling Personal Ads to Trick People Into Sex Crimes

From CBS Sacramento, your daily example of the
disgusting and perverse
lengths law enforement will go to in order to catch “sex
criminals.” Yesterday it was Virginia cops
taking pictures of a teen boy’s junk to compare to the
photos he’d texted his girlfriend, for which they were now
prosecuting him for chlid pornography. Today brings us the story of
California cops trolling online personal ads to trick lonely men
into arranging dates with fake underage girls. 

Daniel Eugene Kirschner, 28, apparently placed an ad online
saying he was looking for a girlfriend. He did not say he was
looking for an underage girlfriend, mind you, nor did
undercover Placer County cops pretend to be underage when they
initially reached out to him. But after a while, the “girl”
revealed that she was only 13.

After that, Kirschner continued the correspondance and
eventually agreed to come to the county jail, where cops said she
would be for her mom’s boyfriend’s court appearance. When Kirschner
showed up, he was immediately arrested and charged with
“communicating with a minor with the intent of committing a sexual
act” and “attempted lewd and lascivious acts with someone under
14.”

A lot of people would probably look at this and say, meh,
he’s a creep or a criminal and deserves it. He should have backed
off when he found out she was 13. And, sure, he should have.
But people are flawed. We don’t know much about Kirschner, but we
do know he was looking online (on what sounds like Craigslist, but
the police are merely calling “a popular website) for a girlfriend.
Maybe he was lonely, vulnerable, in a bad place. A female responds
to his ad and seems friendly and eager (and probably quite mature,
since she is actually a team of cops). She gains his trust and
affection. Then she says she’s only 13.

Under those circumstances, deciding to continue the relationship
certainly reveals a lapse in judgement from our grown perp. But it
doesn’t necessarily reveal him
as predatory or pedophilic. It doesn’t even reveal that he
would have gone through with any sexual activity with this alleged
13-year-old. To me the whole set-up seems similar to the
undercover cops who befriend young people by pretending to be
their age, goad them into selling them pot, then throw them in jail
for it.

How is any of this not entrapment? And by what logic does it
make sense to entice people into crimes they probably wouldn’t
otherwise commit just to arrest them for those crimes?

I’m serious about the entrapment question; the second one, I
guess, is rhetorical. It makes sense when your job, budget, and
prestige depend on making more arrests. I’m sure it’s easier to
arrest regular people you nudge into criminal-ish activity than
people engaged in more stealth and serious criminal behavior. Cops
get their 15-second soundbites about “sex traffickers” and “sexual
predators” on the evening news, communities get to feel safe and
like their cops are actually competent, and if some people and
rights get thrown under the bus along the way, that’s just the
price of doing business. 

This
isn’t the first time this year that Placer County cops have
gone undercover as a 13-year-old girl. Unlike “to catch a predator”
plots past, they seem to be reaching out to men seeking
girlfriends, rather than putting up ads from “teens” and seeing who
responds. The department has also been busy with undercover
operations to lure people into
buying alcohol for minors.