Attorney explains harassment of officers

CHATSWORTH ? Former Glendale Police Officer Arthur Crabtree took the stand in his trial on Monday, explaining the details of a plan he formed to harass law enforcement officers over the Internet.

Crabtree, 45, faces one felony count of attempted lewd acts on a child, three felony counts of attempting to send harmful matter over the Internet, four misdemeanor counts of attempted child molestation and one misdemeanor count of child molestation.

The attorney, who has a home in Santa Clarita but is living in Hawaii, sent a bus ticket in January to an undercover agent posing as a 13-year-old girl and arranged a rendezvous at the Greyhound bus station in downtown Los Angeles, Deputy District Atty. Tannaz Mokayef said. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies arrested Crabtree at the station.

Crabtree also allegedly preyed on several other undercover agents posing as different victims, as well as an underage Santa Clarita girl.

But Crabtree testified on Thursday that he knew all along he was chatting with undercover law enforcement agents, and that he purposely formulated a plan to harass them enough “to drive them crazy,” but not put himself in a situation where he could be arrested.

Crabtree ? who served as a jailer with the Burbank Police Department when he was 18, and was hired two years later as a full-time salaried police officer with the Glendale Police Department ? said he became upset with law enforcement over an internal affairs investigation in 2000.

“I had kind of a burning anger on how that matter was handled,” Crabtree said, adding that he had reluctantly took his lawyer’s advice to retire from the Glendale Police Department based on medical disability.

In starting his game of harassment, Crabtree learned how to use the Internet and started a profile of how undercover law enforcement agents would act online, he said.

He looked for words like “kewl,” “silly,” “silly goose,” or “hee hee hee,” ? phrases he felt didn’t match up with current teenage lingo and teenage chat abbreviations ? to identify police, Crabtree said.

“Did you ever make up a profile of sexual one-liners?” Crabtree’s defense attorney Patrick Clancy asked. “Did you use them over again, from chat to chat to chat?”

Crabtree said he cut and pasted certain phrases between chats and gave out false information about relationships with his wife.

“But you gave some accurate information, too,” Clancy said.

Crabtree needed to keep the undercover agents entertained, he said.

“I had to provide law enforcement with bait,” he said. “It’s just like fishing, you have to put the bait out there.”