Trey R. Barker's Blog, page 6
July 8, 2013
CopStories: …holy crap…how much?
April 22, 2013
Guest Post: Jury Duty
March 20, 2013
CopStories: “I’m being held against my will….”
December 29, 2012
My, what a big…backhoe…you have!
December 13, 2012
CopStories: “Puh-leeeeeeze don’t take me to JAIL!”
November 4, 2012
CopStories: Can I Get My Meat?
October 17, 2012
A Bit’o'Cross-Blogging
September 4, 2012
CopStories: Suffer the Little Children, Pt. 3
August 26, 2012
CopStories: Suffer The Little Children, Pt. 2
The line was six cops deep.
Each officer touched the shoulder of the man in front of them. Everyone crouched low, weapon out, fingers indexed away from the trigger.
Up front a cop carried a battering ram. The next guy had a ballistic shield.
Six helmets, six weapons, six officers holding their breath tightly in their chest.
While a dog barked incessantly.
Not even six in the morning yet. Today we were in a neighborhood a few steps down the ladder from the one the day before. These houses were not quite as manicured. There was no color-coordination, the yards were scraggly, the cars decorated in post-modern rust. It was an older neighborhood, where the best years were years ago and exhaustion was the only thing remaining.
The entry team was grim. There was, after all, the chance of gun play and violence if their knock was ignored; or worse, if it wasn’t.
And still that damned dog barked.
I had nothing to do with the entry and yet I was nervous. Because of the guns and shields, because today’s suspects had extensive rap sheets that included violence, because the dog’s barking gave us away.
Because if this operation went bad, the bad would happen during that entry.
Generally, entry is when teams are most vulnerable. Dynamic entries – either a ‘no-knock’ entry or a ‘knock-and-announce’ but with forced entry – are scary. They involve a chaos designed to confuse the suspects. Because confusion lessens the chances the bad guys will flush evidence or shoot hostages or kill officers.
But that very created chaos also puts the cops at a disadvantage.
I am not a huge fan of dynamic entries. I understand the need for them, they just make me anxious. And that day, with a dog that wouldn’t shut the hell up, I was extremely anxious.
This family was not the family of the day before. Where the previous subject politely opened the door and showed us where he kept his kiddie porn, this family had a number of convictions between them…including resisting the police.
Yesterday we’d been looking for one of the top traders in the state. Today it was a man who traded kiddie porn less frequently, but what he did trade was of rougher grade, grittier and harsher.
“Damn dog’s fucking announcing us,” one of the officers said.
The team, with the commander, myself, and the computer forensics man behind, moved silently through neighbors’ front yards, hugged tightly up against neighbors’ houses. We saw no shocked faces staring out, no one grabbing a phone to make a call.
Except at the very last house before our target house.
“Hey, wha’choo doing?” the lady asked.
She sat on her porch, drinking her morning coffee, holding a newspaper, and staring goggle-eyed at the cops in front of her. The commander took her aside and a moment later she went inside…where she watched carefully through the curtains.
Between her house and the subject’s house, we found the dog. It belonged to the subject and was going batty inside its run. The team got worried the owner was awake and wondering why the hell his dog was so cranky.
At the door, I heard the knock, then the announce. Then I waited for an eternal twenty seconds before the team entered the house.
It was like the morning exploded. Voices everywhere. Clear all the way outside. Commands and demands, orders and calls of “One male in basement,” or “One male secured in front bedroom,” or “Where’s (suspect)?”
And a cacophony from the subjects, too. Confusion, anger, disbelief, a lack of comprehension, that mumbled nonsense that comes when you’re awakened loudly and suddenly.
But within minutes, all the subjects were secured in the living room. No one had gotten hurt and the search team went to work.
It was a nightmare.
There were computers, hard drives, thumb drives, and discs everywhere. But also hundreds of music CDs, thousands of movie DVDs; software instruction discs, hardware driver discs.
Every conceivable square inch of that house was awash in media. It was a cyber buffet for American males raised in a media-saturated environment.
And it all had to be checked. Much of the music and many of the movies were commercially available and so probably weren’t a problem, but much of it was consumer-recorded and that had to be reviewed.
Why?
Ninety minutes of ‘Hunt For Red October,’ then an hour of sex with pre-pubescent boys, then forty-four minutes ‘Hunt For Red October.’
Happens that way with music, too. A few five-minute tracks that are visual – or sometimes only aural – hidden in the middle of a metal mix, or a dance mix, or the best of whatever flavor of the week is melting the pop charts.
Everything had to be checked.
So we started with the media that probably wasn’t involved, with the computers and external drives that belonged to the sons and the visitor. The father was our focus and while I personally believed the sons probably knew about his tastes, I wasn’t convinced they were directly involved in it.
The sheer amount of media belonging to everyone but Dad took us the better part of two hours to scrutinize. While we did that, the team continued searching the house, bringing us even more media, more internal hard drives that were scattered and stored everywhere.
The entire time, command plagued us.
“Anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Anything?”
“We’ll let you know.”
“Anything? We gotta find it.”
“Damnit, we’re looking.”
Every fifteen or twenty minutes command came into the bedroom where we worked and demanded their evidence. They gave us space, but an oddly constricted space. It was nerve-wracking and made my job that much harder.
Eventually, we closed the bedroom door and forced command to stay out. We got through the sons’ toys…no kiddie porn (though massive amounts of adult porn). We got through the visitor’s toys…no kiddie porn.
Then we started on Daddy’s toys, beginning with Daddy’s brand new, high-powered computer.
And two hours later had found nothing.
“Damnit,” the primary investigator said. ”He was trading on-line last night.” He stormed through the bedroom. ”Where is it?”
The main computer forensics guy shook his head. ”He’s used a cleaner.”
“What?”
“There are file names that indicate possible child porn, but no actual files. He’s cleaned this computer. There’s nothing here.”
“Are you saying I have to let this guy go? I know he’s dirty.”
“You may know it…but we can’t prove it.”
“Fuck.”
The entire team stood in that cramped bedroom now. No one said anything. This forensics guy was the best in the state. Everyone used him, from Springfield all the way up Interstate 55 to Chicago. There simply was no one better and he was coming up dry.
The Commander sighed. ”Pack it in, boys. We’re done.”
“Hang on,” the computer guy said. ”I think I’ve got an idea. Might be a shitty one, though.”
August 19, 2012
CopStories: Suffer The Little Children, Pt. 1
When I got there, the house was under siege.
It was a nice house and it fit the neighborhood. Every house upper middle class, each groomed just so and color-coordinated, yards immaculate. Two vehicles in every driveway, usually a sedan and an SUV, both polished and gleaming in the early morning sun. Cats watched from living room windows and dogs barked, though none too loudly or aggressively.
But this place was besieged by law enforcement. County officers, city officers, officers whose uniforms I didn’t recognize. Squad cars, both marked and plain, lined the street and extended all the way around the corner.
At the suspect’s house, everyone was grim. The cops who weren’t inside working the warrant were stone-faced. There were no jokes or flip comments. The tension was as thick as a west Texas sand storm and I understood it…even as a rookie on the task force I understood it and felt it. I knew what the search warrant was for. I knew what we were all hoping to find.
Or rather, what we were both certain and afraid we’d find.
Last year, I backed into a case. It was simple enough…a registered sex offender playing basketball on school grounds. But that simple case ballooned into one that included 17 possible felony charges for everything from sexting minors to grooming minors to actual sex with a 14-year old girl.
Because of that case, my sheriff attached me to the Illinois Attorney General’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. Kiddie porn traded over the internet; via computer or cell phone or tablet or whatever other electronic means come along.
Which sounds great…except I know dick about computers. Thus I spent the last year getting trained on how to track this stuff and put together prosecutable cases.
So on this day, in this quiet and perfectly-coiffed neighborhood, what we were looking for?
Evidence of one of the top traders of child pornography in the entire state.
We found it…easily. There was no serious hunting involved, no need to search and probe and take apart his computer’s every byte.
We knocked on the door, his wife answered, he took us to his computer, showed us where the images were, said his wife didn’t have anything to do with it, and sat quietly while we brought his life down around him and left it in flaming rubble.
But it wasn’t us. We didn’t set him to delve into this world, we didn’t set him to contact people around the world and trade pictures of sex with 8-year olds or sexualized poses of 10-year olds. The spark that set flame to his life was not the task force, it was him and him alone. It was whatever desire drove him to dive into such a sordid world.
Was he sexually attracted to children? Or was he attracted to the money that could be made from those who were attracted to children? I don’t know. Even if my job had involved dealing with that guy after we found the material, I’m not sure I’d have found an answer. Maybe he didn’t even know. There were no indications that he’d ever touched a child, but there had to be some draw, right? I mean, there has to be some attraction beyond the money. I can’t imagine someone getting involved in kiddie porn simply for the money.
So the operation, the first of two spread over two days, went smoothly. Our part was over in just a few hours. And afterward, we all went to a late breakfast and there wasn’t another mention of that guy in that upper middle class house. There were stories and jokes about hundreds of other search warrants, but no more about that day’s arrestee.
It struck me as strangely aloof.
I’ve been in law enforcement for the better part of a decade and I’ve come to understand – and wildly appreciate – the gallows humor and the perversity of the job (when I’m having a good, fun day, someone else is, by definition, having a really shitty day…and that’s totally perverse).
But the ‘after’ of this operation seemed oddly detached. Either the team didn’t want to talk about this guy because he’d affected them so profoundly, or they’d seen so many of these guys, with so much of this material, that it had become routine unless there was something specifically challenging and new and different.
Honestly, I think they were bored with this guy and his images. The senior members of the task force – those guys who’d been doing this for some years – recognized a vast majority of the pictures we found so in a strange way, it was simply business as usual.
“Oh, that’s the ‘Ashlee’ series,” or “Yeah, that’s from the ‘Maddy’ pictures,” or “A guy in Jersey took those a decade ago.”
So I believe they were bored. This guy had been easy to crack and his images had been the same old images everyone had seen a thousand times.
That would change dramatically the second day.
