At a pizza restaurant in Sapulpa, Russell Goodwin approached a man with autism, sitting alone at a table. Goodwin launched a party cracker, and confetti fell through the air. As cameras rolled, Goodwin shouted, “Somebody gave you a free birthday party!”
There was no party. Goodwin revealed the reason he was there: he’d caught the man texting a teenager, asking for sex. What he didn’t say was that the supposed teen was an adult decoy posing as a minor.
At the pizza joint, Goodwin looked into his livestream camera.
“Monster,” he said, using a codeword that signaled another member of the group to call law enforcement.
Goodwin went to his truck outside the restaurant and waited until the police arrived.
“Guess who’s going to jail tonight?” Goodwin sang to the camera.
The man was charged with soliciting sexual contact with a minor using technology, possession of child pornography, and soliciting a minor in Creek County, but the case was dismissed almost four months later.
“They were saying he was too retarded to go to court,” Goodwin said.
Bradley Bennett, a volunteer who works with Goodwin’s group, also decried the dismissal.
“Dropped on the technicality of him being mentally handicapped,” Bennett said.
Goodwin leads Oklahoma Predator Prevention, one of many predator-catching groups that proliferated across the internet since the rise of social video-sharing sites such as YouTube. In 2022, the Washington Post identified at least 160 such groups across the United States.
Goodwin said the evidence they collect is airtight and results in convictions. The group, he said, does not seek internet fame.
“We’re not social media personalities,” he said. “We’re just dads trying to protect our kids and yours.”
The more extreme the content, the more viewers Goodwin garners. In another video, Goodwin shouted at a man, using a megaphone held about a foot away from the man’s face. Goodwin claimed the man had sent a text to someone he believed to be a 12-year-old girl.
In a video posted to TikTok in 2022, Goodwin insisted that a man shave off his eyebrow. The clip has been watched 5.3 million times.
Another popular clip shows a distraught man threatening suicide after Goodwin interrogated him. The man holds a knife to his stomach as police aim a stun gun at his chest.
Oklahoma Predator Prevention uses volunteers who pretend to be children online. Once they’ve found an alleged predator, Goodwin confronts them in person, livestreaming the encounter. The group has 169,000 followers on Facebook, but their content first appears on Kick, a streaming platform with more permissive regulations than other video-sharing sites.
Donations and subscriptions, which earn fans special emoticons, including one of Goodwin’s face, are Goodwin’s primary source of income, bringing in about $1,500 per month.
YouTube kicked the group off the site in January. YouTube’s policies prohibit predator-catching recordings unless police are present in the video. Facebook also removes predator-catching videos, unless the person was convicted, and prohibits dehumanizing speech, allegations of serious immorality or criminality, and slurs. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, lets Oklahoma Predator Prevention maintain a page but sometimes removes its content. Shortly after Oklahoma Watch’s inquiry, at least nine of the group’s videos were removed from the site.
Vulnerable Victims
Some of the people targeted by Oklahoma Predator Prevention have intellectual disabilities, alarming advocates.
In a recent video, made in conjunction with the Houston-based group Predator Poachers, Goodwin accused an autistic man of downloading child pornography. Predator Poachers’ Alex Rosen told the man if he placed his phone on the hood of Rosen’s minivan, the car’s technology would delete the child pornography from his phone. More than ten minutes ticked by as the man stood by the vehicle, waiting. Then the police officers arrived.
In another video, Goodwin and his volunteers spent 45 minutes interrogating Robert Dodd, an intellectually disabled man they accused of texting an underage boy.
“Here you say, ‘You’re only 15 and don’t drive yet, and I don’t drive at all, so how can we hang out together?’” said Ryan Koch, a volunteer who works with the group. “You didn’t know he was 15?”
“No, I did not,” Dodd said.
“Robert, we know all the answers,” Goodwin said.
Koch read the line again.
“OK, maybe I did,” said Dodd.
Some people with intellectual disabilities are more easily persuaded to agree with statements made by those they perceive to be authority figures, resulting in false confessions, said James Trainum, a retired detective from the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C.
Dodd said the encounter, and Goodwin and Koch’s questioning, scared him. Goodwin seemed to notice his fear.
“You’re shaking like a leaf, man,” Goodwin told Dodd, as he scrolled through Dodd’s phone, looking for child pornography.
“I didn’t know what was really going on,” Dodd said.
Police arrived and arrested Dodd, but he never faced charges. He spent three days in jail and lost his job. His relationships with family and friends soured, and he faced harassment.
“I’ve had people around town drive by and call me names,” he said.
Melissa Handke, the district attorney for Carter, Johnston, Love, Marshall, and Murray Counties, declined to file charges against Dodd.
“When a group cares more about social media follows, likes, or shares than about actually getting a conviction in a case, this type of thing can happen,” Handke said in a statement announcing the decision shared on Facebook. “Training and expertise is needed in this type of sting to ensure that my office is able to pursue charges and get a conviction to get someone off the street, not just humiliate the suspect. Unfortunately, too many times the thrill of the chase takes over and instead of turning the investigation over to law enforcement, the group wants to confront and humiliate the individual, without regard to procedures.”
Leigh Anne McKingsley, the senior director of disability and justice initiatives for The Arc, a disability rights organization, said that people with intellectual disabilities do not have access to information about appropriate sexual behavior. They rarely received sex ed in schools, she said, and may be socially isolated, without close friendships that would instill ideas about sexual or romantic norms.
She said those factors, combined with difficulty understanding social cues, can make people with intellectual disabilities vulnerable to sting operations such as Goodwin’s.
“They may end up in their rooms for long periods of time alone, looking for connection on the internet,” McKingsley said.
That could lead them to the dating sites or chat rooms where Goodwin’s group has set up profiles.
The group sets up profiles on dating apps such as Meet24 or Grindr, as well as social media sites such as Facebook. Maj. Adam Flowers, who leads a task force at the Canadian County sheriff’s office that investigates internet crimes against children, said predators looking to groom or victimize minors typically frequent sites used by children, such as Roblox or Snapchat. He said he rarely encounters child predators on dating apps.
“There’s got to be some accountability for these predator poachers, because what they’re doing is not justice,” McKingsley said.
Goodwin recognized that some of the men he has targeted are vulnerable.
“They’re probably lonely,” he said. “They probably message a bunch of girls on these apps all day long. And nobody messages back, right?”
He paused.
“But then they message my decoy,” he said.
Entertainment and Monetization
In 2023, Goodwin noticed that Oklahoma City police were no longer responding consistently to his calls. In one case, he waited at a man’s home for more than two hours. Oklahoma City police never came.
To get more police response, Goodwin started telling many targets that his decoys lived in Pottawatomie County. If the alleged predator was not local, Goodwin, through the decoy, would suggest that the adult get a hotel room nearby.
The Shawnee Police Department no longer responds to calls from the group, said Cpl. Vivian Lozano, a public information officer, unless threats of violence are made at the scene. She said that Goodwin’s confrontations do not require an emergency response from police.
Lozano said the department now advises the group to file a police report over the phone or at the station.
Goodwin is still shopping for police departments that will provide the response he and his viewers are looking for. Goodwin said the group now plans to survey police responses across the state by confronting at least one person in each county.
Koch said police presence is important to the group’s followers, who want to see live arrests, even if the case never results in charges or a conviction.
“Their favorite part is handcuffs,” he said.
Goodwin confirmed what his followers want to see.
“Whenever they’re shackling them up, putting them in the back of the cop car, that’s the best,” he said.
Live Encounters
One of the earliest predator catchers was Chris Hansen, the host of the NBC show “To Catch a Predator.” That show was cancelled in 2008 after one of Hansen’s targets killed himself during a taping.
Live catches create a volatile situation that could result in harm to the accused predator, the predator catchers, or the police, said Flowers, the Canadian County sheriff’s investigator.
“We make sure people are controlled so they can’t get a gun or they’re not armed,” Flowers said. “And it just scares me that one day, when a predator thinks they have nothing to lose, which a lot of times they do, they could do something rash and horrific and cause a problem.”
During one video, Goodwin pounded on a man’s door. The man said he did not want to talk with Goodwin, but Goodwin threatened to call the police and the man relented.
Inside the man’s house, Goodwin hurled questions about messages he said the man exchanged with Bryce, an adult decoy posing as a 15-year-old boy. The night before, the man had texted Bryce a nude photo of another man. Goodwin demanded an explanation.
The man asked him to stop filming, but Goodwin refused; his fans were already tuned in to the livestream.
The man’s hands shook. He admitted he was abused as a child. He said he wanted to help Bryce, that he had sent the nude photo in a moment of bad judgment.
Goodwin hounded him to call his own mother and tell her about his conversations with Bryce. The man grew silent and bowed his head. His entire body trembled.
“I just wanna drop dead,” he said.
When police arrived at the door, the man held a knife to his chest. An officer pointed a stun gun at him and ordered Goodwin to leave the room.
No arrests were made and the man was never charged.
Titled “Pedo Threatens to Kill Himself,” a clip of the encounter is the most popular video on Oklahoma Predator Prevention’s Kick page.
“Now, this is content,” one commenter praised.
Coercion/Duress: Contaminating Evidence
When Goodwin’s targets ask him to leave or refuse to answer his questions, he threatens to call the police. He doesn’t tell them that, no matter what they say, he will still call 911.
He browbeats some into calling their families and confessing on camera.
He tries to confront his targets at their houses whenever possible, so they can’t run.
“We can do things that cops can’t do, right?” Goodwin said. “I don’t have to have a warrant to go in here and question him and talk to him about all this. You know, he can’t tell me ‘I need a lawyer.’”
But fear of arrest could cause targets to admit to crimes they did not commit, and a home visit, in which the group’s members talk themselves into a target’s home, could be intimidating.
Flowers said those tactics can be coercive.
“People will admit to things under duress that are not true,” Flowers said. “Interviews and interrogations have to be done in a controlled manner with people that know the law and that work with the district attorney’s office and know what the lines are.”
Flowers appeared on the Discovery+ show “Undercover Underage,” which follows a nonprofit called Safe from Online Sex Abuse. Similar to Oklahoma Predator Prevention, Safe from Online Sex Abuse aims to identify child predators online using decoy accounts.
But unlike Oklahoma Predator Prevention, Safe from Online Sex Abuse works with police and has been trained in Oklahoma law. They don’t allow their volunteers to have contact with the target during or after an arrest.
Prosecutors may not be willing or able to charge cases using evidence gathered by civilian groups operating without police supervision.
Oklahoma Watch calculated the group’s charge and conviction rates among the 102 people the group says are in Oklahoma on its website. Oklahoma Watch used court records to determine whether those individuals were charged or convicted for crimes related to sexual communication with minors using technology.
That analysis found that, since December 2021, at least 30% of the 102 Oklahomans the group says it has exposed as predators have been convicted. An additional 20% have been charged and have cases pending. About half of the group’s exposures went nowhere.
“We’ve got to have admissible evidence,” said Tulsa County District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler. “If all that information was gathered illegally or in violation of a person’s constitutional rights, all we know is, well, this guy may be a predator.”
Goodwin’s Defenses
Goodwin founded Oklahoma Predator Prevention in 2018, inspired by another predator-catching group. He worried that his children were vulnerable to predators online.
“Our parents told us to watch out for that white van handing the candy out,” he said. “The internet’s a predator’s playground.”
Koch and Bennett said that many of their viewers are survivors of childhood sexual assault, and that victims of the men exposed by the group have reached out after watching the group’s videos.
Goodwin said he makes no distinction between disabled and nondisabled people.
“I don’t treat them any different than I would treat the next guy that’s, you know, got a PhD or whatever,” he said. “They’re talking to children. Or what they think is a child.”
Goodwin said getting police involved in his operations before he places the 911 call would jeopardize his ability to capture on-camera interviews with the alleged perpetrators.
“I don’t want them working around and scaring my pred, you know, before I can get there to talk to them …,” Goodwin said. “If the cops show up with me right then and there, we’re not going to get an interview out of that guy.”
He said that without live confrontations, community members might not find out about an accused predator. If they sent chat logs to police without the filmed interview, he said, the allegation might be swept under the rug.
“We want the exposure,” he said. “We want the neighbors, their friends, their coworkers.”
Goodwin rejected the idea that police are leery of the group. The evidence collected by his group, he said, is airtight. They do not message alleged predators first, and are always quick to disclose a decoy’s age before engaging in lengthy conversations, all factors that law enforcement officials say contribute to the admissibility of evidence gathered through online sting operations.
It’s prosecutors, Goodwin said, who don’t take his group seriously. If district attorneys charged the group’s cases, he said, conviction rates would be higher.
Goodwin also said that district attorneys, such as Handke, pre-judged the group and assumed that he and his fellow volunteers sought internet fame.
Goodwin said that even if an alleged predator is never prosecuted, he feels an obligation to expose them through his videos.
“We live for this shit,” he said. ”We’re constantly sitting here talking to predators all day long.”
