City, “Dateline” Team To Catch
Predators, Arrest 38 Men

By Kurt Helin
Editor

Long Beach police arrested 38 men last weekend in a sting operation for crimes against children, an effort tied to NBC’s “Dateline” series, “To Catch A Predator.”

They appeared in court Tuesday, charged with lewd acts with a minor and bail was set at $100,000. While their cases start to make their way through court, “Dateline” plans to air the Long Beach episode during the October rating sweeps month.

For three days last weekend, police waited outside a rented home in a quiet neighborhood of Los Altos. Online, volunteers from the advocacy group Perverted Justice pretended to be 12- to 15-year-old girls who formed relationships with adult men — some over a couple of days, some a couple of months — and invited them over to “their house.”

“(The men) were coming to the home with the intent of having sexual relations with a child, and we arrested them,” said Sgt. David Cannan of the Long Beach Police Department.

Rather than meeting a young girl, when the men walked inside, they were confronted by a “Dateline” reporter who showed them the evidence against them. When the men went outside, they were arrested.

The crime was not going into the house. Rather it occurred before they even arrived, Cannan said.

“The crime is often committed online,” he said. “They send pictures or links of a sexual nature to people they believe are underage.”

Some of the arrested men never entered the house, some seemed scared off and others just circled the block, Cannan said. However, they were still arrested.

“Whether or not they went in the house, they drove sometimes two and three hours, which to us showed intent to further this relationship,” Cannan said.

After a vice detective saw the “Dateline” series that used similar tactics last year, he reached out to the advocacy group Perverted Justice to work with them. That organization has volunteers who go on line pretending to be young girls, then when they are solicited by older men, the organization keeps detailed records, and lets officials know if there are any crimes committed. They are trained how not to make it a case of entrapment but let the suspect commit the crime.

The LBPD chose to partner with NBC’s “Dateline” — which received high ratings for the series but also saw some critical backlash — for financial reasons, Cannan said. The show paid for the rental of the house — the officers never entered the home — and more. That made an expensive process more affordable to Long Beach, he said.

The goal is to make parents aware of this problem and have them start paying closer attention to what their children are doing online and who is approaching them, Cannan said.

“We’re not going to see an end to the Internet, but these crimes are happening more and more,” Cannan said. “Parents need to talk to their children about this and what they are doing on the Internet. You would not let them just go off and play with someone they didn’t know, not let them sleep over at a friend’s house unless you talked to the parents.

“This is much like that. Parents need to be aware.”

Of the 38 men arrested, only three were from Long Beach. Six drove up from San Diego and many were spread throughout Los Angeles.

These men were not the “classic pedophile” profile, Cannan said. Rather, these tended to be men who spent most of their time in front of a computer and were sucked into a fantasy world that they then tried to make real, he said.

While this type of Internet solicitation of minors is growing, it is still a small amount of the sexual crimes against children.

According to the Department of Justice’s 2002 statistics, strangers (such as what happened with these online crimes) accounted for just 7% of the sexual crimes against children. Family members, immediate or more distant, still commit the majority of these crimes, Cannan said. Family friends and acquaintances also account for a large percentage of the crimes.