Safeguarding kids is state police unit’s priority.
By Esteban Parra, The News Journal (New Castle County, Del.)
Within moments of entering an online chat room, Scott Garland was approached by a number of chatters. They wanted to know what he looked like, how old he was.
Garland was searching for someone, but not for these people. He politely excused himself and kept looking. Some, however, like captainmikem2000, continued trying to engage him, until Garland, who told them he was 13, said he had a baseball game and signed off.
Three hours later, Garland signed on again and in minutes, captainmikem2000 contacted him. At first, captainmikem2000 wanted to know how the baseball game went. But soon, captainmikem2000 told Garland he wanted to perform a sexual act on him.
“Oops, sorry, wrong [instant message],” captainmikem2000 wrote in a follow-up.
Captainmikem2000 apologized that time. But over the next two weeks that the pair communicated online, he repeatedly propositioned Garland until finally Garland consented to meet him for sex at a Dover park.
What captainmikem2000 didn’t know was that Garland was really a detective with the Delaware State Police High Technology Crimes Unit. Waiting at the meeting spot, which captainmikem2000 had selected, were several state police officers. Michael P. Patton, a 38-year-old convicted child molester, who investigators said went by the online name of captainmikem2000, was charged with sexual solicitation of a child and third-degree attempted rape of a child.
Patton’s arrest last month is just the beginning of the case for the high-tech crime unit, which is now searching Patton’s computer. The unit, set up in 2001, is the largest of its kind in Delaware.
Investigators said more than half of its cases involve child pornography. State police officials said exact numbers are not available.
Although child exploitation is not new, child advocates said new technology has made child pornography easier to get and to pass around. Internet crimes against children tracked by the FBI increased more than 20-fold between 1996 and 2003.
In 1996, the agency opened 113 cases involving Internet crimes against children, according to the agency’s Innocence Images Project, which tracks such crimes. The number of cases opened last year was 2,430.
Reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children of online enticement of children for sexual acts also have grown, from 707 in 1998 to 2,123 last year.
With the advent of digital cameras, people can upload pornographic images onto a computer from the privacy of their homes, then distribute them on the Internet where anyone can view them, said Kimberly Mitchell, a spokeswoman for the Crimes Against Children Research Center, a Durham, N.H., group that conducts research on crimes against children.
The work the Delaware officers will do now, examining information on the hard drive and other computerized devices such as cell phones and personal digital assistants, has helped convict numerous people in other cases, most of whom take pleas after they see the evidence against them.
Experts in computer-related crime said Delaware’s high-tech crime unit is part of a national law-enforcement trend that marries old-fashioned detective work and computer expertise.
Electronic data
Delaware’s unit was set up in 2001 after state police administrators concluded that computer-based white-collar crime would keep growing as long as the Internet is an important part of the economy. The New Castle County Police and University of Delaware Police each have one-person high-tech crime units. But with five investigators, the state police have the largest unit in Delaware.
Although white-collar crime is growing, more than half of the unit’s computer investigations are child pornography cases.
Detective Daniel W. Willey, a 16-year state police veteran, said he has become numb to many of the images, but some still stand out: the image of a child in a highchair being molested and an Internet video in which he could see and hear a young girl screaming for her attacker to stop.
“It’s really hard to imagine that human beings can do this type of thing,” Willey said. “But I think we have to remind ourselves that we are dealing with people; possibly they were victimized when they were younger. I understand that is the case with a lot of them.”
One of the unit’s key missions is helping troopers and police officers from other agencies investigate computer crimes.
Using new hardware and the latest security software, detectives can uncover incriminating files, such as deleted child-pornography images and threatening e-mails. They can even retrieve documents from badly damaged computers.
The unit also investigates when a computer system has been attacked by hackers or when they believe someone poses a danger to others, perhaps someone who is searching for a child to have sex with or planning a terrorist act.
That’s why retrieval of the information is so important, said Donald R. Mason, associate director of the National Center for Justice and the Rule of Law, a U.S. Department of Justice program at the University of Mississippi School of Law. The center is developing procedures that states can use to start high-tech crime units. Mason estimated 90 percent of information is now stored electronically, in computer files and in e-mail.
Searching through electronic data, not undercover work, is what the state police’s high-tech crimes unit does most often. From their McKee Road office building north of Dover, the specially trained investigators spend hours on computers searching through documents, images and e-mails from confiscated computers and other high-tech gadgets.
“The cases are tied up with a pretty ribbon and bow when we get them,” said Donald R. Roberts, a Delaware deputy attorney general who specializes in computer-related sex crimes.
Because of the evidence amassed against these suspects, many take guilty pleas rather than face trial. In the last five years, Roberts said, he could remember only two people in Delaware charged with computer-related crimes who went to trial. In about 85 percent of the cases, there is a plea, according to a 2003 study provided by the Crimes Against Children Research Center.
“There are very few defenses,” Roberts said.
Working with others
By studying a computer’s files, Delaware investigators are not only able to find child-pornography images, they can see who has sent them. From one Delaware case, Moses said, investigators found about 40,000 individuals who have shared child pornography.
Police agencies nationwide have been forced to add similar teams in the last few years, not only to handle Internet crimes against children, but also to handle the growing number of white-collar crimes, such as identity theft, credit card fraud and other financial crimes.
Barry Maddox, a spokesman with the FBI’s Baltimore office, said his agency started its team in 1995, two years after a search for a Maryland boy turned up two men with decades worth of child pornography stored on their computers.
Today, each of the FBI’s 56 field offices has at least one agent devoted to online crimes against children, Maddox said.
He also pointed to the increasing number of people arrested either for traveling to have sex with a child or having the child travel to them: In 2002, there were 406. There were 519 last year. In the first six months of this year, Maddox said, there were 282 such arrests.
Maddox attributes the increasing arrests to better policing, which child advocates said is one way to help protect children.
Another is for parents to be aware of what their children are doing on the Internet.
“It’s good for everybody to be aware of what their kids are doing online, what they can encounter online, purposely or not purposely, and what they can do when their kids come in contact with this,” Mitchell said.