INDIANAPOLIS — In a cluttered office cubicle in a nondescript building on Indianapolis' derelict east side, a man with rolled-up shirt sleeves scans email attachments of videos that depict startlingly young children being sexually tormented in ways that can make even federal judges weep.
Detective Kurt Spivey is trying to find the people who record or collect such images. He has 30 days to locate as many as he can. After that, the trail could go cold as the data on the hard drive dissolves.
Spivey is a 43-year-old police detective who parlayed his nine years in vice and experience with computers into a position on the city's cybercrime unit. It's part of central Indiana's Internet Crimes Against Children task force, which has become one of the nation's most aggressive and effective child pornography hunters, with a reach that extends around the globe.
"They are really cutting-edge," said Francey Hakes, who worked for three years as a special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General overseeing child exploitation units in various agencies within the Justice Department. "I would say that most districts that have learned of some of the techniques and tactics used there have tried to model and adopt them as best they can."
At first blush, Indiana isn't a likely location for such a group. Though it has its share of violent crime, the state is better known for its hospitality, auto racing and love of basketball than as an international hotbed of perversion.
Yet in 2011, the latest year for which U.S. Department of Justice statistics are available, Indiana's task force made 166 arrests for manufacturing, distributing or possessing child pornography. New York City's task force made 16 arrests, and Chicago's team made 71.
And Indiana did all this with about $100,000 less funding than New York City.
Much of the success of the Indiana team, which includes federal, state and local agencies, stems from the reach the Internet provides. The team also benefits from a rare level of cooperation among the law enforcement agencies that has largely eliminated turf wars. ...continued... by CHARLES WILSON
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