This is something we are seeing more and more of in Polk County — suspects who are using dating apps to sell illegal narcotics,” Judd said.

Besides the 60 arrests, authorities also obtained warrants for eight people who are currently at large.

This was a marvelous piece of  detective work I am sure like all things the police do, was carried out in a logical and fair way.

But where does the policing end and the dating begin?

And would any other community have allowed this? Say it was an app that only catered to African Americans?

The decision to hand the car keys to the cops for an app that ostensibly services and fosters relationships for a community that has been historically  discriminated  by law enforcement it is the vector for thousands of hate crimes, murders, sexual assault, rapes, drugs, appears awfully cavalier Attacks based on sexual orientation represented 16.8 percent of all hate crimes in 2019, the last year statistics were available from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report. That represents the third largest category after race and religion.

The specific number of these crimes committed using the app is difficult to come by and as far as I know there has been no actual comprehensive survey. In 2017 however, Global Dating Insights, a B2B resource  based in the United Kingdom said: The number of crimes where dating apps were mentioned in the police report has risen by 700% over the last two years. Although the figures do suggest that dating apps are being used by criminals more often to commit crimes, the increased acceptance and widespread use of dating apps could also account for some of the reported increase, as the figures include every time Grindr were simply mentioned in a police report.

A cursory viewing of Grindr’s murder sizzle reel is horrific and the scope may not be known for years. According to Quartz,Grindr saw the emergence of “a new type of sexual offender. Usually a man, he’s less likely than other sexual offenders to have committed any kind of crime before, but instead exploits the “ease of access and arm-chair approach” to meeting people that dating sites enable. Grindr in particular is tight lipped and the most egregious when it comes to protecting users. And that’s just for adult users. It’s particularly harmful to children.

Safer Kid: Sexual energy can be hard to manage, especially at a young age, and so you can imagine how a gay child in his early teens might get aroused seeing photos like these and want to try to talk to one of these guys (or more). Especially in early teens, where kids want to be treated like adults and don’t know that a few clicks can create really bad outcomes for them.

So, if the gay child in his early teens wants to, after getting aroused, try to talk to these guys, he has to “register,” which basically involves filling out four fields on one form. “If he says he is 13, he is told that he cannot use the app. But then he can immediately change his age to 18, and voila, he’s an adult and can freely hookup with men on Grindr. Grindr was actually sued by a user who was arrested after he had sex with a minor he met on the app. He said he relied on Grindr to verify the victim’s age. A court ruled that Grindr was not responsible. And so, they have zero incentive to add any more roadblocks here. In fact, it would be bad for their business if they did.

Go to Google News  and look up  ‘Grindr child sexual assault’ and ‘Grindr child rape’ and quickly found articles about 25 different criminal cases (not counting duplicates) in 2015 alone. They’re documented here.

The stories are out of control. In one, a police officer stumbles across an adult and a minor in a parking lot. In another, four separate men had sex with the same 13-year-old. And a different 13-year-old let a man into a hotel room he was sharing with his parents and had sex with him in the bathroom while his parents slept. In August, a single mom went to work and her 13-year-old son went on Scruff (a Grindr competitor with a similar sign up experience) and invited a man over and had sex with him. Afterwards, the teen discovered the man was HIV positive. And then he told his mom what happened.

Grindr (and its competitors) are members of a community that fights for civil rights. I don’t know them, and I’ve never spoken to them. When I talk to people, it’s usually the people on the ICAC Task Force investigating the crimes and prosecuting people. But I think its time that Grindr’s community, and parents and legislators, stand up and look at the sign up processes being used in these apps. And while I’m sure that Grindr has a PR crisis strategy in place for if anyone ever looks to closely at this, I am hoping people will be able to look past it and focus on the numbers. It’s horrifying. And it’s wrong. These are the children in their own community struggling with coming of age. If anyone should be sensitive to them, it should be the people who are making these products.

And that doesn’t even address exploitation. GBH: German Chavez was 14 years old when he first started using a gay dating app called Grindr to find adult men to pay him for sex.He needed to help his troubled single mother pay the bills, he said, and had no trouble finding men to purchase him on the popular location-based mobile app.Now 25 and years away from the sex trade, Chavez is warning other minors to stay away from Grindr, one of the most popular apps in the country for gay and bisexual men.“Things that can be bad can happen to you, possibilities of death, [going] missing or being locked in a room where you can be taken advantage of as a sex object,’’ said Chavez, who now lives in Malden. “It’s an at-your-own risk place.”

Jenifer McKim

The company touts its mobile platform as “The World’s Largest Social Networking App for Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer People” and says its users have to be 18 years old and older.

But the app is teeming with underage gay, bisexual and questioning boys, according to researchers, child exploitation specialists and users like Chavez who say they can easily lie about their age to gain access to the service.

Many LGBT teens are seeking connection in a world that provides few safe spaces, researchers say. Some like Chavez are looking to find sex buyers to survive. But an investigation by the the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting finds that too often the adult men they meet are dangerous and the encounters can lead to sexual exploitation, assault and trafficking.

“It creates an easy place for sexual predators to look for these kids,” said Jack Turban, a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. “Grindr is also at fault for knowing that this is happening and not doing anything about it.”

Since 2015, more than 100 men across the United States — including police officers, priests and teachers — have faced charges related to sexually assaulting minors or attempting sexual activity with youth they met on Grindr, according to a GBH News search of public records.

What’s particularly appalling about Grindr is the vector it’s become for HIV transmission. HIV Plus: the CDC’s 2017 HIV Surveillance Report, that showed that although  HIV rates of transmission continued to decline overall in the United States, there was a new trend, a spike among a new population: gay identified males ages 13 to 14 and among male youth in general aged 24-29. Without any research and due to privacy laws around children, not a single explanation  was offered suggesting why the spike happened at all.

Perry N. Halkitis, the head of the Rutgers School of Public Health, the country’s largest, is gay and worked for years in the HIV field, he told me that unfortunately, when it comes to minors, researchers hands are tied as they cannot ask them, even if they are potentially at-risk if they are gay.

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