A council worker in Hull has been sacked and fined £500 after luring a 30-strong mob of vigilante paedophile hunters to the address of a sex offender, reports the Metro.
Hull City Council customer service assistant Chloe Carr, 23, shared the man’s address with a Facebook group dedicated to tracking down paedophiles, and it resulted in the mob trying to break into the property and threatening to burn it down.
The offender, who had been convicted and completed his prison sentence, was immediately rehoused due to the incident, which Judge Mark Bury said risked making him ‘unpredictable and more likely to commit offences’.
Chloe obtained the man’s address while working from home and receiving a work group chat from a colleague. The sex offender had asked for a food parcel to be sent to his emergency housing as it was too dangerous for him to go shopping, and his address was shared on the chat. When Chloe shared the information on the Hull-based Facebook group, she asked to be kept anonymous, writing ‘This can’t come back to me due to my work.’ Not sure Chloe knows how the internet works because this was all posted on Facebook under her own name.
That same evening, the sex offender called police to say around 30 people were at his door trying to break in, and had been warned to ‘get out now or they would kill him and burn down the property’. Half an hour later, the group contacted Carr to say he had been moved from the house, to which she replied: ‘I am so happy. He is bloody awful. Happy to have helped everyone.’
Eventually, police identified Chloe and her messages and seized two laptops from her home. She told detectives that seeing details of the sex offender on her work chat had made her ‘quite angry because she was pregnant’ and ‘knew it was wrong’. In the end she admitted unlawfully disclosing private data to an online website without consent and was fined £500, and also sacked from the job at the council. A charge of misconduct in public office, which would have carried a maximum penalty of imprisonment, was dropped after a ‘thorough review by a number of different people’.
Judge Bury told her:
You are very lucky about that. The offence that you have committed is, in my view, a very serious one that would have carried a sentence of imprisonment.’
I would have locked her up. This is not a public service at all. [The offender] had done their punishment. It wasn’t for you to give their details out.
It would not take much imagination to work out what the anti-paedophile group were planning to do. The problem that this causes is that it destabilises offenders.
It makes them unpredictable and more likely to commit offences that everyone else is trying their hardest to prevent them from doing. It’s not doing a public service at all. It’s a huge disservice.
Well I can see what the judge is saying. As heinous as any sex crime is, once an offender has served their time then that’s that. They’re put on a register and are left to fail every CRB test for every job they apply to. Then again these monsters ruin so many children’s lives forever that it does often seem like an injustice when they are allowed to go free at all. Especially with some of the shockingly tame sentences we’ve seen given out over the years. So I’m not saying Chloe Carr should have done what she did, but I’m not saying she shouldn’t have done it either. Just probably best to not do it again.
To watch a paedophile fall over and bust his face while running away from vigilantes, click HERE.
