Police helping online teens

Sometimes it helps to have a disinterested 3rd party in a parent-teen discussion - at least the town of Murrysville, Pa., appears to see it this way. The town will hold its "first in a series of parent/teen discussions with the police department" at the community center next week to talk about Internet safety, the Murrysville Star reports. Police say there haven't been any teen-predator face-to-face meetings in Murrysville, but the town wants to head any such possibility off at the pass – for example, what happened in the Tampa, Fla., area recently. A 42-year-old Seminole High School teacher tried to meet in person with a 14-year-old Tampa girl he found and contacted in MySpace.com, the St. Petersburg Times reports. Some online-safety experts tell kids not to respond to messages like this, to just tell their parents. This girl did both, which worked fine in this case. She replied to the man saying "she thought it was strange that he would want to be friends with her since he was so much older than she, and then informed her mother about [his] message, investigators said." The mom called the police, who, it turns out, had been corresponding online with the man for four months posing as naïve teenage girls. They arrested the man in a sting operation.