Some of the problems will be more fundamental: She will find that all of the arrests may have been illegal. Under Texas law, there are only certain circumstances under which a police officer can make an arrest without a prior warrant. But in all of these “To Catch a Predator” decoy-house arrests, it will come to light that not only was there no warrant but the police had done literally no prior investigation. Instead, they simply camped outside the decoy house and arrested the men who emerged after receiving a prior signal from the Dateline crew inside. The only thing Doris Berry won’t quite be able to figure out is whether this means that Dateline had become an agent of the Murphy Police Department or whether the relationship was the other way around.====
This series causes quite a bit of lively discussion at DU. You can read the entire Esquire article online at:
http://www.esquire.com/features/predator0907Nine months ago, NBC's 'To Catch a Predator' arrived in Murphy, Texas, to conduct a sting operation. The only honest thing that followed was the gunshot....It is past 3:00 p.m. and Chris Hansen, the host of “To Catch a Predator,” a recurring series on NBC’s Dateline television news program, arrived here at 8:30 this morning, having gotten hardly any sleep the night before. He never gets much sleep on these shoots. Although aspects of his show are tightly choreographed, Hansen and the rest of his production team must always remain loose limbed, ready to adapt to changing circumstances and unpredictable hours. The show’s protagonists, after all, are recruited on the fly, and everything depends on them. They drive the plot, and Hansen never knows exactly where that plot is going to take him. Before the unexpected series of events that began yesterday afternoon, for example, Hansen had no intention of ever being here, outside this house, waiting for a SWAT team on an overcast Sunday afternoon...
As Dan Schrack leaned against a folding table and talked on the phone, a number of Perverted Justice employees sat at nearby desks, working on computers. At some point, after Schrack hung up, some of these people ran the screen name and e-mail address and phone number of the man known as Wil through a variety of Internet search engines. They made certain discoveries, among them Wil’s real name and occupation.
A cameraman recorded a scene shortly thereafter, when one of the Perverted Justice employees informed Chris Hansen. He told Chris Hansen that the man they thought was nineteen was actually fifty-six, that his name was Bill Conradt, that he was not a college student but rather an assistant district attorney of a neighboring county, the county’s chief felony prosecutor....
At a little after 9:00 p.m., Detective Patterson overheard Lynn Keller, the lead producer of “To Catch a Predator,” discussing Bill Conradt with another Dateline employee, trying to come up with different strategies they might employ to lure him to Murphy. Detective Patterson was the only law-enforcement officer inside the decoy house, and at that moment, standing there listening to a couple of civilians devising ways to lure an assistant district attorney, he was beginning to feel very uncomfortable. He felt as if he was being made party to something he was not at all sure he wanted to be involved in. Finally he approached Keller, told her that as an officer with the Rowlett Police Department, he felt obligated to call his boss, the chief of police, and give him a heads-up regarding the whole matter brewing with Bill Conradt. Lynn Keller stopped him cold.
“You’re working for Dateline now,” she said...
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