JUST LIKE THEY DO IT ON TV! (EXCEPT NO CHRIS HANSEN)

You've seen NBC News' Dateline newsmagazine series "To Catch A Predator", where reporter Chris Hansen, along with volunteers and law enforcement officers, would set up a sting operation to go online and catch suspects who were expecting to meet and likely have sexual relations with a teenager after they had met in an online chat room.

The Polk County Sheriff's Office followed that format over the weekend in leading a sting which ended up with 20 men from as far away as Gainesville being charged with items from Solicitation of a Minor via the Internet to Transmission of Material Harmful to Minors to Attempted Lewd Battery. One of the suspects was also charged with Resisting Arrest without violence, and another with a drug charge.

As a matter of fact, Dateline producers had approached Sheriff Grady Judd about his agency taking part in the "Predator" series but declined, saying he felt more comfortable having his own detectives handle the investigation from start to finish. The NBC crew was insisting on volunteers from the group Perverted Justice, which has worked with the show in it's previous editions of the series, do the online chats. They went to Fort Myers instead and worked with the Lee County Sheriff's Office.

The PCSO worked out of a house in southern Polk County, with several detectives spending time concentrating on local online chat rooms and getting into conversations with adults believing they were on with a teen. The suspects would eventually direct the chat into a more sexually explicit direction. When they would say they were interested in a meeting, they would apparantly be given a phone number to call and a time was set up. The phone had a voice machine set up to allow the detectives the ability to sound more childlike, and calls were recorded.

The rest, as they say, is history. The chump would show up, and put down quickly by deputies.

A couple of sidebars:

Chris Hansen, the Dateline reporter who has done the "Predator" series for the newsmagazine, is scheduled to testify this morning before the congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations (among it's members: Democrat gubernatorial candidate Congressman Jim Davis of Tampa; a distant relative of mine is Vice Chairman) at it's hearing in Washington which has been titled “Making the Internet Safe for Kids: The Roles of ISP’s and Social Networking Sites.” And he has local ties as well: The Michigan native spent some time in the early part of his television career as a reporter for WFLA-TV 8, Tampa's NBC affiliate.

And the Polk County Sheriff's Office has done the whole TV bit before. In the very early days of Fox Television's series Cops several segments were filmed with local deputies which aired; I believe it was the first and/or second season.