Virginia law enforcement officers have tracked 19,357 hard drives that contain hard-core child pornography but lack the resources to go after the offenders, they told state lawmakers Wednesday.
Only 48 officers across Virginia are trained to target online predators, and most are assigned to the issue part time, according to Jesse Ferguson, a spokesman for Del. Brian Moran.
“That’s 19,357 people that we can identify today that as of right now we do not have the resources and capacity to arrest and prosecute,” Ferguson said.
A 2005 Department of Justice study found that 55 percent of people who possessed child pornography also had committed contact offenses with children.
Moran has proposed state legislation that would allocate $18 million toward expanding Virginia’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program, a Justice Department-funded initiative that trains officers and coordinates efforts for targeting cyber criminals.
“In one of the smaller police departments in the state, one of the officers who trained to do this is also a patrol officer,” said Tim Evans, a captain with the Virginia State Police who is Northern Virginia’s ICAC task force commander. “There are people who are very, very dedicated who do this on top of other responsibilities.”
Fairfax County, Arlington County and Alexandria have some of the most active cyber-criminal units in the state and have multiple trained officers, Evans said.
In December and January, three undercover operations in Northern Virginia netted 60 child-porn or child solicitation cases, including Matthew McGuire, the Chantilly High School Spanish teacher and track coach who was charged with soliciting a minor online, Evans said.
The Howard University men’s soccer coach, Joseph Okoh, also was charged with soliciting a minor online, Evans said.
The number of Northern Virginia jurisdictions that have affiliated with the task force has been growing rapidly. Seventeen new jurisdictions joined last year — an effort that involves paying for cyber-crime tracking software and equipment and training at least one officer in the department.
Michelle Collins, director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said the center receives about 2,000 reports of online child exploitation a week. She said she supports allocating more resources to the issue, but that most Virginia law-enforcement officials she deals with are responsive and prepared.
“We really have had fantastic experience with them.”
