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| "Soul-destroying" work: police analyze child porn images to find victims, offenders. |
| 2005-04-27 |
| By Maggie Farley, Los Angeles Times. EFL -- LRR -- hat tip: Kathryn Jean Lopez, National Review. Long excerpt, but it's a really powerful story. TORONTO — She is perhaps 12 now, her hair still light blond, but she doesn't smile anymore. Over the last three years, she has appeared in 200 explicit photos that have become highly coveted collectibles for pedophiles trolling the Internet. They have watched her grow up online — the hair getting longer, the look in her eyes growing more distant. "She's a collector's item," says Det. Sgt. Paul Gillespie of the Toronto Sex Crimes Unit. "I know somebody out there could lead us to her. But right now, the only ones who can see her face are the wrong ones." . . . A 25-year veteran of the Toronto Police Service, Gillespie is a tall, mustached man with intense energy, blue language and a willingness to push boundaries — including teaming up with Microsoft's Bill Gates to pioneer a tracking system that became available this month to any police unit investigating child pornography. . . . Their work is a daily sojourn to the underworld. Gillespie has a team of 10 men and six women who spend hours in front of their computers, extracting leads, writing warrants and sifting photos for clues. The payoff is the day they get to kick down a door and take the "bad guy" away. The mood is light and the humor often off-color to ease the horror. . . . That is one of the biggest challenges of the Child Exploitation Section's work. They need to get inside the minds of the victims and the perpetrators to find them, but there is only so far they can — or want to — go. . . . One night in 2003, a frustrated Gillespie e-mailed Gates asking for help creating a database that could combine data from around the country — and the world — to help track down offenders and their victims. To his surprise, Gates responded. After a year and a half of collaboration, Microsoft Canada and the Toronto police unveiled the Child Exploitation Tracking System this month to help investigators share information. The system is designed to enable police in any country to plug into the system and cross-check data, including names, Internet aliases and the digital signature of every captured photograph. The software is free to any police team working to stop child pornography. "It's important, because when we see a new series of photos online, that child could be anywhere," Gillespie said. "We need to cooperate and not duplicate each other's work. We just traced a toddler to a particular neighborhood in Spain through a subway ticket in his picture.". Gillespie hopes the tracking system will not only link the often-overlapping investigations around the world, but that it will save his team heartache by letting the computers do some of the dirty work of sifting through the photos by their digital signatures. "We arrested a bad guy last week," he said. "There were 1,000 images on his hard drive. Can I pay you enough to sit at this computer and look at every image? There are babies raped and sodomized with romantic music playing in the background. You are never the same person after you see something like that. It's soul-destroying." . . . For hours at a time, [Det. Constable Paul] Krawczyk looks at pictures of abuse that the average person could not even imagine. His immersion in this sordid world doesn't leave him unaffected. "Sometimes you just want to take a shower after doing this," Krawczyk says. "Sometimes you want to throw the computer across the room. But when we do get a bad guy, it gives you great satisfaction. He wouldn't have been caught any other way." . . . Krawczyk sometimes sneaks a look at a framed quote from Nietzsche above his computer: "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." But nothing purges the taint of the day like the way his son runs to hug him when he walks through the door at night, he says. . . . Their hard-won successes keep team members on the right side of sanity. One day last year, they discovered pictures of a 6-year-old girl cowering in a dog cage, her gaze perplexed and despairing. In another, her hands are bound, a hunting knife is pressed to her abdomen, and messages are written on her body in a red substance meant to look like blood: "Hurt me." "Kill me." "I'm a slut." Her face is flushed purple. She is crying. "These were some of the most horrific images we had seen," Gillespie says. "We dropped everything to look for her." They were lucky to find a few clues in the pictures: an orange wristband from an amusement park, her school uniform, a logo from a T-shirt. They found the amusement park in North Carolina, then contacted uniform manufacturers to narrow down which schools in the area used that particular pattern. "About 36 hours after we got the pictures, we pinned it down to a certain school," Gillespie recalls. "The FBI showed her pictures of her face to the principal, and bam, they rescued her." The confessed offender, Brian Tod Schellenberger, has been arraigned and faces up to 30 years in prison. His victims are undergoing intensive counseling, the first step in the long process of recovery. . . . To paraphrase Orwell, our children sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men like Paul Gillespie daily descend into hell on their behalf. May I suggest, to those who are prayerfully inclined, that you put in a word for the souls of Det. Gillespie and Det. Krawczyk and their comrades. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #5 ... Belgian cops or Dutch cops? |
| Posted by: Edward Yee 2005-04-27 11:44:49 PM |
| #4 Sea - It was. It does. |
| Posted by: I was never here 2005-04-27 3:51:47 PM |
| #3 Surely that database could be modified to track terrorists as well??? |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2005-04-27 3:33:37 PM |
| #2 Wow. I dont think I'll ever complain [much] about my job again. These folks (Gillespie, Krawczyk, and, yes, even Bill Gates) are the real heroes. And your right. they really do 'descend into hell' to help these children. God bless them all. I hope they put that POS Schellenberger into Gen-Pop and then let eveyone know what he's in for. |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2005-04-27 3:17:37 PM |
| #1 Thank you, Mike. This is very good to know. Of course, just after we moved back from Belgium, it was revealed that the police were the main suppliers of children to the Dutch paedophile circuit... |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-04-27 12:44:22 PM |