For the previous 21 years, James has labored for a personal safety firm as a plain-clothes officer in high-street shops, primarily on London’s Oxford Street. He’ll typically movie the folks he detains, both to indicate to the police or to share together with his colleagues over WhatsApp. But since February, he’s discovered a brand new residence for his footage: his TikTok account, @london_content, which already boasts almost 100,000 followers.

In his most-watched video, considered greater than 25 million occasions, an alleged shoplifter could be seen eradicating gadgets from her skirt, soundtracked to Sam Smith’s “Unholy.” The caption reads merely: “She got caught.” Other movies declare to indicate folks pickpocketing or counsel they is perhaps a part of a “begging scam.” Now, on his days off work, James will stroll the streets of London within the hope of capturing criminal activity—in different phrases, extra viral fodder for his TikTok.

“I’ve had people comment thanking me, saying that it’s helped them spot pickpockets on the streets,” he claims. “And people love the content.”

While it’s true that @london_content and accounts prefer it are rising in recognition on TikTok, not everybody enjoys the movies they share. Stefan Bloch, a professor of cultural geography and significant criminology on the University of Arizona, argues that social media content material exhibiting folks allegedly committing crimes might worsen neighborhood paranoia and imagined threats, which are sometimes racialized. “We turn to these surveillance technologies to reaffirm the stereotypes we already have and to validate our fears,” he says. He compares it to different neighborhood watch apps, resembling Nextdoor and Citizen, which equally seize and mirror communities’ prejudices.

“The only positive effect that these videos could have is holding people with more power accountable,” Bloch provides. This consists of state abuses of energy, resembling police brutality. But as Bloch argues, filming already marginalized folks with out their consent is far more durable to justify.

James doesn’t see it this manner. He requested WIRED to not share his id as a result of he’s not permitted to submit these movies of his work, however he doesn’t suppose the topics of his movies needs to be given the identical anonymity. For him, the query of whether or not he needs to be filming folks, and doubtlessly implicating harmless ones, isn’t an element. “I show their face to warn people and make them aware,” he says.

James isn’t the one vigilante posting this kind of content material to TikTok. Videos of alleged petty crimes are proliferating on the app; a lot of them could be discovered underneath the “shoplifter” hashtag, which has 863,200 million views, and “theft,” which has 1.5 billion views. And there at the moment are dozens of nameless accounts dedicated to sharing this sort of content material, amongst them @shoplifterhero, @stolenwatchgroup, and @gasstationthieves0. While the folks importing this content material typically preserve, like James, that they’re in search of justice or elevating consciousness, their movies—which generally deploy trending sounds on the app—are a controversial type of leisure.

When requested about its coverage towards movies that present folks alleged to be finishing up crimes, Anna Sopel, TikTok’s security and coverage spokesperson for the UK, mentioned, “Our Community Guidelines are clear that we do not allow content that depicts or encourages criminal activity, including theft, on TikTok. We do allow content that clearly condemns illegal activity, however we do not tolerate members of our community being harassed, and abusive content will be removed from our platform.”