By Erin Chan, Detroit Free Press (Michigan)
Graphic sex. XXX. And full frontal nudity.
When it appears in magazines tucked under the mattresses of hormone-crazed teenagers, parents can easily toss them or, if they’re extra zealous, run them through a paper shredder.
Policing the abyss of the Internet - and the access it gives to millions of porn sites and chat rooms - is more complicated.
Picture files can dwell deep in the recesses of a computer’s memory, where parents can have a hard time finding them. A quick hit on a Web site can bring on a barrage of images that are unintentionally downloaded. Even scarier are freewheeling conversations that may be occurring between an unsuspecting child and an online predator.
But police departments across metro Detroit have an answer to parental fears.
It’s called ComputerCOP.
In the past several months, local police departments have been distributing free customized software that helps parents check for questionable material on computers, some of it so far embedded that they may not be able to find it on their own.
After purchasing the program from a company in Long Island, N.Y., the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, the Southfield Police Department and Canton police began distributing the free software this fall. Dearborn began its program last year. Sterling Heights offers the same software for $1.
The ease of the software impressed Cheryl Thomas, 45, so much so that she is helping her husband, Southfield Police Chief Joseph Thomas, by promoting ComputerCOP to Southfield’s school board and to its parent-teacher associations.
“I don’t want parents to see it as a tool to catch their children,” said Thomas, the mother of three teenage sons. “It’s a tool to protect them.”
Catching online predators has become an intense focus for the county sheriff’s offices in metro Detroit as Internet usage among kids has become as popular as having a high-speed connection.
John Roach, spokesman for the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, said the county has arrested 60 people suspected of being Internet child predators since January 2003. The computer crimes unit of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office has arrested 43 since 2001, according to Undersheriff Mike McCabe. And Capt. Tony Wickersham, who oversees the Macomb Area Computer Enforcement team, said the Macomb County Sheriff’s Office has apprehended 50 online predator suspects since 2003.
Last week, Cheryl Thomas demonstrated the program at the Southfield Public Library. She popped a 3-inch mini CD into her personal laptop, and ComputerCOP started on its own, taking 2 or 3 minutes to scan the computer’s files.
When the scan ended, 677 pictures awaited Thomas’ inspection. She discovered nearly 60 useless and sometimes questionable images.
Some, such as publicity shots of teachers and students that automatically downloaded from Eastern Michigan University’s site without her knowledge, did not concern her. Others, such as a skull and crossbones reading “death full flavor” and another of a woman’s butt, thighs and calves, gave her pause.
“Nowadays, all children have to do is log on and a buxom blond pops up,” she said. “They sometimes can’t help but look at her. It’s thrown in their faces.”
With the program, Thomas tracked the origin of the pictures to either computer software or unwanted files from the Internet. Then, she erased them.
ComputerCOP also searches text documents for questionable words like “explosive” and “violence” or “sexual” and “suicide.”
Stephen DelGiorno, president and founder of ComputerCOP, said the program looks for more than 1,000 specific words, including slang. It hunts down phrases, too, such as “I want you.”
The thought of parents monitoring their kids’ computer activity does not evoke concern from Kary Moss, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan. Though the organization has opposed the use of Internet filters by institutions such as libraries, Moss said checking up on a child is just good parenting.
“We encourage it,” she said. “We’ve said it’s really the parents’ responsibility to monitor their children’s usage.”
In September, the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office went further than most metro Detroit police departments when it began distributing 9,100 copies of ComputerCOP’s deluxe version, which allows parents to monitor what has happened in chat rooms and e-mails. The $38,000 purchase was funded in part by grant money and private donations.
Wayne County Sheriff Warren Evans said officers received an enthusiastic response when they handed out the CD-ROMs to local police departments and schools and at malls.
While all of the ComputerCOP programs at the Wayne County Sheriff’s have been given away, Evans said the department intends to spend $25,000 next month from a grant to purchase thousands more. Detective Jim Dziedzic of the Southfield Police Department said the city ordered 2,000 CD-ROMs of the program’s original version at a cost of $5,700. About half of them are gone.
Southfield police, like other public safety agencies, received a large discount on the program, which usually retails for at least $19.95 online or in stores.
At the Southfield Public Library, Leah Moir, 71, clutched two copies of the program, intended for her two adult children to use to help safeguard her six grandchildren.
“This is extremely useful,” said Moir of Southfield, as she watched Thomas demonstrate the software. “Parents are not home all the time. They should know what their kids are watching.”