Crime & Safety
Do Not Try To Trap Suspected Child Predators: Bartow Sheriff
The Bartow County sheriff is asking the public not to try to trap suspected child predators after the posting of a vigilante video.
CARTERSVILLE, GA — The Bartow County Sheriff's Office is reminding the public that they advise against vigilantism after a video named "Predator busted in Cartersville" surfaced on YouTube.
"We do not advise untrained civilians to set up 'busts' as they can be very dangerous and we do not want anyone being inadvertently injured," the sheriff's office said in a Facebook post in response to the video.
The video, posted to YouTube on Wednesday, shows a group of men in a Walmart store confronting a man they say planned to meet with a 14-year-old girl. The men claimed to have chat messages from the man they confronted.
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According to the video, the man said he thought the person he was meeting was 21 years old, but the men who confronted him said they had messages verifying he was talking to someone he thought was a 14-year-old.
At the end of the video, the group escorts him out of the store and to his car.
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No charges have been filed in the case.
In their response to the video, the Bartow County Sheriff's Office also noted that "multiple legal factors must be adhered to for arrests to occur from these types of chats which were not in place in this incident."
Sheriff's investigators are investigating the assertions.
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