An Iowa man was arrested last night across the river in the Omaha suburb of La Vista, for allegedly trying to arrange a sexual encounter with a teenage girl. La Vista Police Chief Bob Lausten says he was picked up by the Metro Area Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force.

That task force meets about every week, the chief says, going on-line as a group to target the large number of predators out there, and last night it culminated in the arrest of a Council Bluffs man. The undercover operators arranged for the "girl" to meet him in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant, where officers arrested 23-year-old John Metteer of Council Bluffs.

Chief Lausten says this was the fifth arrest in a year credited to the task force. "It seems like every time that the task force is up and running, they seem to make an arrest every night, and last night was no different. The suspect wanted to meet a young woman — actually it was a police officer — who he thought he was going to be able to have sex with." He says the Council Bluffs man wasn’t the only one the members of the computer task force chatted with last night.

"The ones that we didn’t catch last night, a lot of them were using their webcams to masturbate and do things to who they thought were 13, 14, 15, twelve-year-old girls on the other end of the Internet." The Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force is operated by officials from the La Vista, Bellevue and Papillion police departments, the Sarpy County Sheriff’s office and the Nebraska State Patrol