What is wrong with this vigilante?

A man by the name of Brian Bates has begun using drone technology to rat out suspected sex workers and clients to the police.

According to The Smoking Gun, Bates, who runs the anti-sex work website JohnTV.com, was hanging around Oklahoma City looking for lives to ruin when he spotted [name withheld…let’s call her Jane], a woman he recognized from his past efforts to ruin her life. Noting she was still alive and taking steps to support herself, he followed her until she got into someone’s car [let’s call him Jim].

As he states in his garbage web show, Bates tailed the vehicle until he got scared of a random man sitting in his car who he thought might be a “violent pimp,” at which point he sent his drone after Jim’s car as it entered a deserted tire yard. They stopped what they were doing and fled as soon as they saw the drone, but those few seconds of footage were enough to convince an Oklahoma prosecutor to charge them with “public lewdness” — never mind that the only “public” witnessing their activities was the creep using a robot to spy on them.

According to the ACLU, numerous states have passed laws requiring probable cause warrants to be issued before admissible evidence can be collected using drones, but Oklahoma has yet to finalize such a law. In this case, the probable cause affidavit was created after the fact, which seems shady.

Most upsettingly, though, the guy collecting the evidence in this case was not even a cop tasked with enforcing our country’s backwards prostitution laws but a private citizen who hates sex workers so much he’s made it his mission to get them and everyone they work with arrested and shame them on the internet…a bad Samaritan, if you will.

On his website, Bates describes himself like this:

“Since 1996 Oklahoma’s own Video Vigilante Brian Bates, has been using his video camera to document the graphic realities of street prostitution, expose the perpetrators and dispel the myths that further the abuse.

JohnTV.com achieves this goal by lifting the veil of anonymity that empowers the ‘Johns.’ “

As anyone should be able to see, though, the only abuse going on here is a guy using high-tech toys to harass and hurt people who are already marginalized by society.