I've been a frequent visitor to www.pervertedjustice.com in the past few days. 

This is site that has volunteers go into chat rooms posing as teenage girls and waits for some older man to take the bait and engage them in conversations of a sexual nature.  They then tell him he's been 'busted' and post his personal info (name, age, picture, phone number and even address on some cases) on the front page of the site.  They call it 'taking down wanna be pedophiles'. 

Something about this site made me uneasy.  Really uneasy.  So I went and did a little searching. 

Contrary to what the sites owners would have you believe, they're not endorsed by Law Enforcement Authorities.  The link that they have on the site to their 'police friends' is actually to 'Police World', a message board that is supposed to be for law enforcement officers but that anyone can join.  In fact, I've found more evidence and statements from LE officers and officials saying that they think it's a bad idea than I have in support of the site.

The main concern seems to be that the volunteers aren't trained.

"The Perverted Justice investigator wanna be's think it's so easy to go into a chat room and just start talking, and for them it is, because they have no goals in mind other than humiliating someone and getting media attention" said Julie Posey, a Colorado activist who has worked with police in chat-room stings for 8 years and helped convict more than 70 men.

Ray Johnson, a deputy investigator with the Internet crime unit for the Wayne County MI sheriff's department said that vigilante stings also make prosecution more difficult, because they put people on notice that police might investigate them, and they don't folow the rules the police use to avoid issues on entrapment. Deputy Johnson said that if he tried to use transcripts of chat room come-ons in a criminal proceeding "they'd throw it right out in a heartbeat"

My own personal investigative sources (Not my husband) state that whilst they too agree that PJ's volunteers "hearts are in the right place" but that "they're playing a dangerous game and leaving them selves wide-open for prosecution.  Police departments are doing things to try and catch these perverts, and these folks make our job that much harder"

So, it would seem that my feeling of uneasiness is somewhat justified.  Don't misunderstand me, I want to see these losers exposed as much as the next person.  But, I want to see them prosecuted, to see them jailed, to see their names of the Sex Offender's registry. I want to see the job done properly, with the backing of law enforcement and the US criminal justice system. Pervertedjustice.com , while it's intentions are good, in my opinion just isn't the appropriate means to get that job done.