When Ottawa police issued a relatively rare public safety alert in August warning that a high-risk, violent sex offender had moved to the city’s downtown, Hilary Ibey took notice.
Ibey says her 13-year-old son and nearly 11-year-old daughter have always enjoyed “a fairly long leash” to play in a park near their central Ottawa home, but since the warning from police her mother’s instinct has been to keep them closer.
“I’m more conscious of them being out on their own,” Ibey told CBC’s This is Ottawa. “I am much more conscious, particularly in the evenings, of what’s happening.”
The warning issued Aug. 21 concerned Aaron Gilpin, 35.
According to police, Gilpin had relocated to Ottawa from nearby Smiths Falls, Ont., and has a lengthy criminal record including “a sexual offence involving a child, assaults, weapons offences, disarming a police officer, break and enters, and thefts.” (In a similar alert issued a month earlier, Smiths Falls police described the child sexual assault as “brutal.”)
Gilpin, who has distinctive tattoos on his face, forehead and throat, had finished serving his time and is no longer under any release conditions or other restrictions, but Ottawa police warned that he still “poses a significant risk to public safety based on his history of violent and sexual offending.”
Shortly after police issued the warning, local chat groups lit up with sightings of Gilpin all over Ottawa-Gatineau.
“Sexual predator ‘Aaron Gilpin’ was following me and my son around Walmart on St Joseph in Hull today until I took out my phone and started filming him.. pls be careful and keep your kids close!!” cautioned one.
“Aaron Gilpin — known sex offender seen in and around the Tanger Mall and Johnny Leroux Arena in Stittsville. Please take extra caution with your children,” warned another.
Confrontation caught on video
Some people went further. In one video posted online, a woman can be heard angrily confronting a man resembling Gilpin in a downtown park, pursuing him as he walks away. In another video, someone approaches a man resembling Gilpin on Elgin Street, pushing their camera toward his face for a better look.
That’s despite advice from Ottawa police not to approach Gilpin and to call their high-risk offender management unit only if he’s seen “involved in criminal activity.”
We encourage members of the public to remain vigilant, while avoiding confrontation or taking matters into their own hands.– Ottawa Police Service
Ottawa police declined an interview request, but in a separate statement to CBC a few days after the initial notice they noted it’s “important to recognize that a person’s status as a registered sex offender does not, by itself, mean that their presence in a public place or their ordinary lawful activities constitute an offence.”
“We encourage members of the public to remain vigilant, while avoiding confrontation or taking matters into their own hands,” police wrote.
In other words, vigilance is encouraged, vigilantism is not.
A complex issue
Ibey, who says she learned about Gilpin through neighbourhood chat groups and text message chains, acknowledges it’s a complex issue, and not an easy one to broach with children.
“I wanted to get across the message of being aware of their surroundings and making sure they’re taking care of each other and taking care of their friends,” she said of her own kids.
“I also think it’s really important for kids to hear that this is how the justice system works, and people do their time and then they are released and people deserve to live in a community, and whether it’s our community or another community. I worry a little bit about this idea of everybody watching out for a person and that person being targeted, because they have to live somewhere, right?”
Michael Kempa, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa, said it can be very difficult for offenders to carry on with their lives after release, especially when they’re being “hounded” by members of the public.
“You can’t easily go about applying for jobs, you can’t easily go about producing or providing yourself with housing — these are the things that are a pathway back to offending again,” Kempa said.
That’s a potential pitfall with issuing such public warnings, he said.
“They want people to be vigilant, they want people to adapt their behaviors to this risk. What they don’t want is to create a never-ending network of surveillance around an individual where he’s simply being hounded for being spotted around town. That’s unfortunately what very often happens in these circumstances.”
Kempa believes police should play a more active role after warning the public about the release of a high-risk offender.
“They should be monitoring what’s being said following their releases, and in some cases intervening in the public communication or advising people that [vigilantism] is not what the police have in mind,” he said.
“So it’s a bit more of an active role of not just putting the warning out there, but guiding people once the … genie’s out of the bottle and people are discussing it as to what they’re meant to do with that information.”
‘No one is disposable’
Michaela De Curtis, the program director and only paid staff member of Circles of Support and Accountability Ottawa, a community-based charity that helps sex offenders reintegrate into society after their release, agrees it’s a profoundly complex problem. (Gilpin is not among her clients.)
The program’s motto is, “no more victims.” Its other motto is, “no one is disposable.”
“We recognize the harm that the people we’ve worked with have caused, but at the same time they’re coming back into the community and they need some levels of support in order to be successful,” De Curtis explained. “And so we’re not minimizing the things that they have done, but we’re also not throwing them away because of the things they’ve done.”
De Curtis says she’s never seen a social media frenzy like the one that followed the warning about Gilpin’s move to Ottawa.
“Typically [when] a notification happens there’s some attention, some online chatter. It usually goes away within a few weeks, maybe two months at most, but this one seems to be continuing on,” she said.
De Curtis says she fully understands why some people react the way they do when they see Gilpin out in public. But she also knows from experience that without the right kind of support, offenders like him are more likely to reoffend.
“We can either provide supports to someone and hold them accountable, or we can isolate them and push them away, and we can’t really be that surprised if they do end up reoffending,” she said.
