To Catch a Predator fails in Dallas suburb
NBC sex predator sting shakes up Texas town | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle
MURPHY — A sting in which police teamed up with Dateline NBC to catch online pedophiles was supposed to send a flinty-eyed, Texas-style warning about this Dallas suburb: Don’t mess with Murphy.
Instead, it has turned into a fiasco.
One of the 25 men caught in the sting — a prosecutor from a neighboring county — committed suicide when police came to arrest him. The Murphy city manager who approved the operation lost his job in the ensuing furor.
I think my husband and I have seen a few of these but certainly haven’t been watching them religiously. I have a problem with arresting and prosecuting people for something they think they are doing as opposed to something they are doing. It always leads to lively discussion here if nothing else and it never hurts for a television show to start a real conversation but I just don’t see how stings like this can work. Certainly I understand that minors can not be used by police as bait and so I don’t have an answer but it seems to me that someone posing as a minor isn’t a minor and then what is the offense they are being charged with. I also understand these are bad people looking to hook up with minors and there should be a way to stop them, I just don’t think this is it. I know it always surprises me how easy these guys are to find and it is a lesson to all parents to watch their children’s internet usage very closely.
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