Child porn unit has backlog

Minneapolis police officer Dale Hanson was searching an Otsego home earlier this month, and getting what he came for -- the suspect's laptop computer and a confession to possessing child pornography.

Still, there was a forensic exam of the machine to be done, and as Hanson sat in the Minneapolis crime lab a few days after the search, he said that it would probably be a month or two before he could get to the task.

These are unprecedented times for the Minnesota Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, for which Hanson is Minneapolis' representative. In the first six months of this year, the task force had 53 cases accepted for prosecution, compared with 24 in the same period a year ago, Cmdr. Neil Nelson said last week.

Task force members say the state has no shortage of targets to go after. On June 13, when he first looked at the files in possession of the Otsego man, Hanson said there were 2,460 computer addresses in the state with at least one file containing child-porn images and/or videos.

"I just try to focus on the worst out there," he said.

The increase in prosecutions is partly because of extra investigative muscle created by the participation in recent years of the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and by the coordination of efforts with more than 55 affiliated police departments and sheriff's offices across the state.

During the Sept. 16 search of the Otsego residence, Hanson was accompanied by a Minneapolis crime lab co-worker, two BCA agents, a Sherburne County forensic examiner and two Wright County sheriff's office employees, he said.

The task force is trying multiple strategies to chip away at that backlog.

In the next two years, Nelson said, he plans to use federal stimulus money to add three forensic examiners to the BCA, which now has three. The BCA also is training investigators across the state to help "bookmark" child-porn images found on seized computers.

Better bang for buck

Before the BCA came on board in 2006-07, the task force was run out of the St. Paul Police Department, which tapped federal dollars for the effort. St. Paul Police Sgt. Bill Haider, who joined the task force in 2003, investigated the cases, and for those outside St. Paul, he would package what he'd learned and send it to other agencies.

In 2007, for an undercover sting investigation called Operation Rapala, the task force set out, too, to combat online solicitation of minors for sex.

Haider, chatting as a 14-year-old girl, tapped out teenage declarations such as "u were gonna take me shopping!!!" before a Blaine attorney ultimately crossed the line and professed a desire to have "her" touch his penis at the movies.

Hanson chatted with a Rochester-area man who it was later discovered also had been typing lewd come-ons to two other Operation Rapala operatives -- one being detective Craig Martin of the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office.

Though the operation was deemed a success by the task force, Hanson said that he thought the eventual sentences were too light, especially given the time requirements: "I can probably generate 10 or 20 [child-porn] possession or distribution cases for every chat case," he said.

Nelson said he hoped more of the undercover chat investigations could be handled by affiliate agencies, who he said have investigators who like the work and who have the support of their county attorneys.

Like Hanson, he said that child-pornography file sharing, with its potential for longer prison sentences, is perhaps a better place to devote the energies of the task force.

There are always new places and computers to search, too. Two days after the Otsego visit, Hanson said he had come up with five more child-porn cases worth pursuing.