Crimes without borders
Police unit hunts down child abusers
It was a nice house on a nice street, with a seemingly normal family living inside. The photographs hanging on the walls showed the family smiling and happy.
The father had a good job and spent lots of time with his children. He played hockey in his spare time, had close friends, and volunteered in the community.
When Sgt. Mike Lokken walked into the house on a Friday afternoon, a child’s birthday cake was sitting on the counter. Birthday presents were wrapped and piled on the couch, ready to be opened at a little girl’s seventh birthday party that evening. But there wouldn’t be a party.
Instead, the girl and her mother were taken to the Zebra Child Protection Centre while Lokken and his team searched the house for anything that could hold electronic information. Anything that may have recorded evidence of the sexual abuse the man had inflicted on his youngest daughter, from the time she was barely a toddler.
Inside a building in the far west end of Edmonton, members of Alberta’s Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) unit work in a maze of tidy cubicles and specialized computer labs, investigating online child sexual exploitation around the province. The computers, cellphones and hard drives being examined on any given day have connected to the very corners of the globe, the limits of the imagination, the depths of what someone can do to a child.
“It’s a little bit unique from typical crime investigations because our evidence sometimes is spread out across the globe,” says Lokken, a 16-year member of the RCMP who heads the team’s investigations in northern Alberta. “Because the Internet has no borders, our investigations don’t either.”
The ICE Unit is a 32-person team of police officers, contract technical workers and support staff that operates as part of Alberta Law Enforcement Response Teams (ALERT). The Edmonton-basedICEteamhas 15 people, all focusing their efforts on the northern half of the province.
Lokken says dealing with sexual abuse victims earlier in his career got him interested in working in the area of child sexual exploitation, a field of policing many officers shy away from, especially when they have children themselves. Lokken admits he was concerned at first, particularly since his kids are the same age as many of the victims in cases he investigates.
“You never know how you’re going to react, and everyone who comes in here reacts differently,” he says. “But it is very rewarding work, because you get to rescue and help out these true victims who are otherwise helpless.”
George Edwards, one of the unit’s forensic investigators, approaches the things he sees on the job with a grim practicality.
“In 30 years of policing, I’ve been to murder scenes. I’ve picked up dead bodies of I don’t know how many people,” he says. “(Child pornography investigation) is not a very pleasant thing, but a lot about policing isn’t pleasant.”
New cases come to ICE every day, sometimes from RCMP investigators in Ottawa, from international agencies such as Interpol or Homeland Security in the United States, or from anonymous tip lines like cybertip.ca.
Lokken goes through every case as soon as it comes in, looking at the details then triaging it with other cases in the unit. The unit can juggle dozens of files, and a case where a child is being abused or is in physical jeopardy always goes to the top of the list.
Choosing what to investigate first is a heavy responsibility, and everyone in the unit knows what it could mean to make the wrong decision. Lokken says those are the choices that keep him awake at night.
“If you ask what the worst part of my job is, it’s not the material that we see, although it’s horrible, horrible stuff,” he says. “The worst part of my job is prioritizing the stuff and hoping that you’re making the right call.” It’s impossible to investigate every case. There are simply too many coming in every day, and the investigations can be huge and complex.
ICE took on more than 480 investigations last year and charged 125 people. But with more officers, Lokken says the unit could probably have taken on twice as many cases. The pool of potential investigations can seem bottomless. Cpl. Rachel Rohatyn, a 17-year RCMP veteran, says when she started in the ICE unit last spring she was surprised by the number of cases in Alberta.
“And this area is only getting bigger,” she says. In part, that’s because the crime of online child sexual exploitation is as vast as the Internet itself, and the investigation techniques must change and adapt as quickly as technology does. “It used to be,” Lokken says, “that you just yanked the chord out of the wall and took the computer to Tech Crimes. But it’s a little bit more complicated than that now.”
It was a love of computers that originally led Edwards into the ICE unit. Now retired after 30 years with the force, Edwards works with ICE on contract, spending his retirement years chasing sexual offenders.
Edwards says the investigations get more complex almost by the day. People now have more devices than ever, and evidence can be divided among desktop and laptop computers, gaming consoles, phones, digital cameras, social media accounts, backup hard drives and off-site data storage.
Internet connections and storage capabilities are greater than ever, capable of handling information in a way that wasn’t possible even three years ago.
“They can easily leave their computer running, and if they find a site, they could download thousands of pictures a minute,” Edwards says. “You can go out and buy a three
This field ... is protecting the most vulnerable CPL. RACHEL ROHATYN
terabyte hard drive for $150 today. And you could literally load hundreds of thousands of pictures and tens of thousands of movies onto just that one $150 hard drive. “Those are the technological challenges that we have.”
Savvy offenders will also go to great lengths to hide or destroy evidence of their crimes, and Edwards says finding the digital “shrapnel” people thought was gone is one of the best parts of the job.
“There is the little extra satisfaction when you can find something they were trying to hide, or that they thought they deleted, but surprise! It’s still there,” he says.
It is those good moments — finding the evidence that can secure a conviction, rescuing a child from an abusive situation — that the investigators hold on to during difficult ones.
Rohatyn says she tries to focus on the children, who sometimes don’t have anyone to protect them — even their own families, who in some cases turn a blind eye to abuse.
“This field in particular, is protecting the most vulnerable, who don’t have the age or the ability to be able to protect themselves,” she says. “Somebody’s got to protect them, and that’s important.”
Seasoned investigators come to recognize certain victims on sight, as images are traded and recycled, one child’s abuse shared by offenders around the globe.
“Sometimes the investigators see children grow up through these series of pictures,” Lokken says. “They see them from the time they are a baby or toddler all the way up to their teens.”
The little girl in the birthday case was first seen by police in an investigation in Italy. Her identity was unknown then, but as police investigated the case led to Ottawa, then to Edmonton.
Looking through the file initially, Lokken believed the pictures showed evidence of recent abuse, and he made the investigation a priority. When someone in the unit recognized that a family photograph had been taken in Calloway Park outside Calgary, investigators knew the girl had been in Alberta at some point. They raced to try to figure out who she was, and how to find her.
“That was on Friday morning,” Lokken says. “By 5:20 in the afternoon, the father was in custody.”
After searching the house, police seized a laptop, two cameras and a BlackBerry. The devices contained hundreds of movies and photographs the father had made of himself sexually abusing his daughter, and voyeurism images of other children in the family home.
There were also close to 2,000 images he’d collected of other children — including bondage imagery and images of very young children.
The 39-year-old man was later sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Crown prosecutor Diane Hollinshead, who works in special prosecutions focusing on child sexual exploitation files, says the case shows the catastrophic impact of child sexual exploitation on an entire family. She says it’s not only the impact of the actual abuse on a child, but the profound betrayal of trust in a family, and even the economic impact of losing the sole breadwinner.
“A whole family’s life is changed forever,” says Hollinshead.
She said the child’s mother had no idea about the abuse until the ICE team came to her house. The stakes of each investigation are high: Investigators don’t want an offender to go free, but neither do they want to wrongly accuse an innocent person of such a heinous crime.
“In this job, you deal with everyone from the homeless person on the street to very, very prominent members of the community that people trust and look at as role models,” Lokken says. “We have to be very careful to do the investigation properly, because there’s probably no worse label that could be put on a person.”
In 2012, ICE investigated cases in Calgary and Edmonton but also in smaller communities like Athabasca, Hinton and Smith. The suspects included a doctor, a volleyball coach, a school bus driver and a trucker.
Last month, an Internet group known as Anonymous released a video claiming it had entrapped Edmonton men by posing as underage girls in the group’s own online sting. Anonymous issued ICE an ultimatum: Arrest the men or have them identified on the Internet. The names, pictures and other personal information of two men were then released, with the promise of more to come.
Lokken says the situation exposed deep — and potentially dangerous — misunderstandings about what police need to bring a child sexual exploitation case to trial.
“(With Anonymous), we have no idea how they collected this evidence, how truthful they are being with us, the chain of evidence, the context of the evidence,” Lokken says. “People need to recognize the difference between information and evidence, because they are two completely different things. Evidence is what you can take to court, and is used to secure a conviction. Information is what I consider what was sent to us by Anonymous.”
Lokken said the Anonymous actions also took investigators away from other cases that were more serious.
“You know you are going to have armchair quarterbacks,” he says. “You can’t take it personally, and you hold on to the moments when you hold people accountable for hurting a child.”
Edwards says the problem may come down to unrealistic expectations of police and the justice system by people who spend more time watching the law portrayed on TV than they do reading about it in the Criminal Code.
“The CSI effect, as it’s coined, is that we can just go in and in a few seconds get all the evidence that we need. Then, after a couple of gun battles, we’ll arrest the bad guy and it will be in court, and the guy will be off to jail after breaking down and confessing,” he says. “People don’t understand that it will be not one hour, but hundreds and hundreds of hours, that will be spent to get a successful prosecution. People don’t realize what it takes. To put the guy in jail, that doesn’t take one hour.”