TRAVERSE CITY- The main policy suggestions to come from Sunday?s National Governor?s Conference was a mandate that schools teach Internet safety to students and parents and equip law enforcement with the training to deal with online predators.

Present at the meeting of the Education, Early Childhood and Workforce Committee, while Gov. Jennifer Granholm was away to attend the Natural Resources Committee, were a handful of governors including acting Chair Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell, as well as New Hampshire’s attorney general, 2007’s Miss America, an Illinois Internet crimes investigator and an executive with MySpace social networking site.

Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire attorney general, said that for every few online predators states arrest, several more will take their place, therefore, she said, “We can’t arrest our way out of this problem.”

Instead, she said, states need tough sexual predator laws in place, updated to include Internet crimes and also need to devote dollars and time to training law enforcement to crack down on offenders.

She added that since cybercrime crosses many geographic boundaries, governors should encourage law enforcement officials to coordinate their efforts, sharing their lists of predator names, e-mail addresses.

Although MySpace receives a lot of flack for giving predators access to kids via its chat rooms, that company has actually worked the hardest with law enforcement to catch predators, said Richard Wistocki, Internet crimes investigator with the Naperville, Illinois Police Department.

In fact, MySpace this year created the first national list of registered sex offenders and provided it to attorneys general across the country, including Michigan’s Mike Cox, who this summer published the names of offenders on his web site.

Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer with MySpace, said that states could help his company keep better track of offenders who often change their e-mail addresses or create multiple identities, by requiring that convicted sex offenders list their e-mail addresses along with their physical addresses on the state’s offender registry.

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