Source: seaQwa Qnews from media reports
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla -- Daytona Beach News-Journal on Friday printed photographs and names of nine men arrested on misdemeanor charges  by a large police team that ran a sting to find men who were coughing, sneezing, and tapping their feet in a local mall restroom.

The story is identified as "News: Front Page" on the paper's website.

The paper reports that a team of six officers from the Police Department's criminal suppression team joined forces with undercover officers from Volusia County Beach Patrol to nab the offenders from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday. The Beach Patrol regularly deals with similar misconduct at public bathrooms near the beach, Police Chief Mike Chitwood explained to the paper.

Chitwood told them, "The reason that we did this sting is we all go to the mall; our kids go into the bathroom. That they could be susceptible to this kind of behavior is absolutely a disgrace."

A former Daytona Beach city commissioner and a local high school teacher were among those arrested in the sting and pictured in the paper. The teacher resigned, after posting $1000 bail.

The nine men arrested by Chitwood's large team were each charged with two misdemeanors -- lewd and lascivious conduct and exposure of a sexual organ.

With help from outraged and shocked members of Chitwood's force, the paper explains the investigative dragnet built to make the arrests.

Detectives received a tip from officials at the Sears department store that sexual misconduct was taking place in its second-floor men's restroom, Chitwood said.

Further investigation by police found that encounters at local places like Sears were advertised online on Web sites like Craigslist and one that provides links to other sexually explicit sites, Chitwood said.

"This is a clandestine, subculture event," Chitwood said at a Thursday night press conference. "There's a whole culture that runs under the radar doing their thing."

"Most everything that's occurring is nonverbal," said Sgt. Jeff Hoffman, supervisor of the criminal suppression team.

Offenders coughed or sneezed, tapped their feet, sometimes under the stall beside them, or made loud zipper noises to attract attention from others interested in engaging in sexual acts, Hoffman said.

"It's scumbags like this that erode the quality of life that we have here," Chitwood said. "What scares me is that these are people that we trust to be political leaders, these are people that we trust with our children."

In its Saturday edition, the paper again printed photographs of two of the misdemeanor miscreants and offered more detail on what it called "the high-profile sting."

Daytona Beach police staked out the second-floor Sears restroom all day Thursday after the store manager informed them he had caught men masturbating in the stalls, and that a suspicious man was repeatedly seen on camera entering and leaving the restroom. Investigators also saw this restroom -- and others in the area -- listed on several Web sites as a hook-up place for men.

"We didn't move in to make an arrest until the person masturbated," Hoffman said.

A police report described one of the arrested men as lowering himself sideways to the floor and looking into the officer's stall. Then he stood up and masturbated, the report states.

The paper reports that the officer stepped out of his stall, and the man made eye contact with him through a crevice while in the midst of the lewd act, the report said.

Another arrested man, a sports trainer, positioned himself so an officer could see him masturbate through the cracks in the stall, the report states. When police read the man his rights, he told them he "did not finish," the report said.

Because a restroom stall doesn't completely conceal a person, he has no expectation of privacy, making any sexual behavior unlawful, Hoffman said.

Snaring a minor local politician in the sting echoes the scandal involving Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, who was arrested at a Minnesota airport restroom in June after investigators said he made suggestive signals to an undercover cop in an adjoining stall.

The paper proudly boasts that its Friday story with pictures of the nine men arrested generated more than 120,000 page views and hundreds of comments on The News-Journal's Web site. That's more traffic, it admits, than the entire site gets on a normal day.