OKLAHOMA CITY — It was a bright-blue winter morning in this Bible Belt capital, and Brian Bates was happy. The balmy weather conditions, he explained, were conducive to his peculiar line of work: public humiliation.
Steering wheel in one hand, camcorder in the other, Bates slowly drove a white Ford Explorer with tinted windows past a procession of sad-eyed prostitutes. But his camera was not trained on them; it was targeting their customers.
Bates, the self-styled Video Vigilante of Oklahoma City, sneaks up and surprises men consorting with prostitutes and then posts cleaned-up versions of the footage on the Internet -- to disgrace them.
"If you get caught by the cops, you pay a fine. If you get caught by me, you get a life sentence," Bates bragged as he trailed a middle-aged man who had invited a young prostitute into his red Ford pickup. "There's no reprieve, no probation. People will be hitting that video on Google searches as long as you live."
Bates, 38, is among a burgeoning breed of activists who are using inexpensive video technology to capture immoral and socially unacceptable public behavior. Often they focus on criminal acts committed under the nose of law enforcement. Sometimes they point the camera at the authorities themselves.
In New York City, a frustrated motorist who calls himself Jimmy Justice tapes traffic officers as they break the laws they're supposed to enforce. In Oceanside, Calif., a former Marine known as Gangbuster posts videos of purported gang members. In Chicago, an art studio owner dubbed the Lake Street Lookout chronicles street violence outside nightclubs, and was taping last August when a man was shot in the back five times and killed.
Because of Bates' sexual subject matter and penchant for shameless self-promotion, he may be the most notorious of the video activists. Tens of thousands of people watch his clips on the Internet every year, eager to be amused by the sight of a man being shamed -- and when they do, Bates profits.
What started out as the modern equivalent of a tarring and feathering in a town square has become a paycheck for Bates, a former marketing manager for a hospital. Bates still has a regular job cobbling together lists of people jailed the night before that he sells to ambulance-chasing attorneys every morning. But he's hoping to leave that behind for a full-time career as a public humiliation professional.
