In the first part of this exclusive two-part interview, Kelly Inabnett, a law enforcement veteran and solutions engineer with Veritone, discusses his experiences as a sex crimes and human trafficking investigator. Part 2 examines how Veritone’s iDEMS can help speed investigations into child sexual abuse materials and sex crimes while reducing investigators’ vicarious trauma.
Police1: Give me a little bit of your background in law enforcement and how you arrived at Veritone.
Kelly Inabnett: I started off working as a deputy sheriff for the Contra Costa County (California) Sheriff’s Department in the protect custody module. Inmates committing crimes related to sexual assault and gang dropouts were mainly who populated that area. After about 15 months, I decided to lateral work to Antioch Police Department.
After about three years on patrol, I went to work as a detective specializing in sexual assault, crimes against children, human trafficking and basically all the crimes no one wants to talk about, just because of the toll it takes on you and just the general taboo nature of all those crimes.
And then I’ve got two beautiful little girls. I just decided I wanted to spend more time with them and focus on my family. And Veritone offered me that ability with this new job and I‘m still able to contribute back to the law enforcement community.
What is human trafficking?
Talk to me a bit about what human trafficking is and the other types of crimes it can encompass.
Inabnett: So human trafficking basically entails both labor trafficking and sex trafficking. Basically it‘s using people or having people perform some sort of labor with some threat of coercion or violence. Then there‘s also the – we call it the sex trafficking portion of it – but it‘s basically prostitution or pimping. But the pimp has a threat or some sort of coercion towards the sex worker and keeps them in line using violence or threats. That’s basically the two subcategories of human trafficking.
What is the biggest challenge in investigating human trafficking?
What are some of the challenges as an investigator when it comes to those types of crimes?
Inabnett: The biggest challenge is usually gaining the trust of your victim, especially if you have people who have been failed by law enforcement or come from countries where there’s not a positive relationship with law enforcement. So you have to overcome that. And they’re usually people that have been threatened, they’ve been beaten, they’ve seen other things happen to people that are just honestly, utterly terrifying. Sometimes they feel it’s safer for them not to say anything and just go along with the program because at least they feel that their needs are getting met or there’s not an immediate threat to them.
You have to show them that you’re able to provide that safety to them, and so while doing all of that, you end up collecting the evidence regarding the case. There ends up being mounds and mounds of digital evidence, and that’s before you’ve even conducted your interview of the suspects.
The toll on investigators
So when investigating CSAM cases, sexual assault and human trafficking cases that are reliant on so much digital evidence, if you were to go through traditional methods, what kind of impact does that make on the investigator?
Inabnett: It’s tough.
The hard part is that you’re looking for what’s possibly the most traumatic thing that you’ve ever seen in your life that someone has had to go through.
The hard part is that you’re looking for what’s possibly the most traumatic thing that you’ve ever seen in your life that someone has had to go through. And you’re looking for evidence of whether it’s sexual abuse or CSAM in and of itself.
The fact that children are going through this … It’s not just the picture that is used to make it CSAM – there’s a living child that has to go through it. There has to be some sort of sexual nature in it to make it CSAM and you’re sitting there browsing through all of these photographs to find this one thing and you don’t know when you’re going to hit it.
Being able to go through everything more efficiently and to be able to choose when you’re going to see a portion of it is, in my mind, huge. Just to make sure that you’re ready for it instead of waiting to get hit. It’ll condense all that information into just the pertinent amount.
To be able to find that and locate that in an expedited way is extremely helpful, especially if you have someone in custody. You have a turnaround that you have to get a case filed in and if you arrest him on Monday versus a Friday, you have a totally different timeframe of when you need to get the case reviewed by.
That’s not counting the potentially five to six hours – depending on the size – it would take just to extract the cell phone. Then you have to load it into your reader and then you have to search through all of it, so you basically spent a half day to a full day just loading up the evidence versus being able to put it into Veritone. Then it can ingest it and search through the pertinent stuff and expedite your process so that you can look through what’s important instead of going through all the extra stuff that’s not going to be relevant to your case.
So by speeding it up too, if there’s a victim that needs to be rescued, I’m sure that amount of time makes a difference for the victim, would you say?
Inabnett: Exactly. Depending on the need of the case – whether or not there’s an immediate threat to someone – changes how things go. Everyone’s worked cases where you’re like, “I need to get to this case. This is a really good case,” but you have something that keeps coming in or assigned to you so you’re not able to get to this case and it keeps getting unfortunately bumped down on the priority list because even though it’s the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to this one person, they’re not in danger anymore. There might be other cases coming in, in other cases, that might be worse, which is unfortunate. To have to tell someone that their case is not the top on your list is a very painful thing to do.
A lot of them understand it, but to have to do that you constantly have that in the back of your head to be able to go through things quicker and to be able to bring that resolution to more people instead of having that case sitting on your backlog for two or three years, just because it takes that long to be able to bring that closure to the victims and to also make sure that you’re not having potentially a suspect out there that’s going to reoffend because sexual offenders are more likely to reoffend than other crimes.
What do you wish that the public knew about the prevalence of these crimes and what you’re doing to fight these crimes?
Inabnett: I guess the big thing is that it’s everywhere. It’s not just what you see in the news. For the majority of the population, it’s not something they’re aware of or want to think about. Sex crimes in general are not on the news a lot unless there’s something else tied into it, whereas a homicide happens and it’s all over the news and people want to be safe. But there are, I’d say, five to 10 times more just sex crimes in general that are reported than there are homicides and they’re not nearly as much out there. That’s even a low percentage because I think about 31% of actual sex crimes are even reported. That’s an abysmally small number.
Note: The above conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
