Policing the predators

Rhett McQuiston makes a really good 12-year-old girl.

Sitting in front of a computer screen, the lieutenant with the Utah Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force poses as a girl, replying to instant messages, careful to use misspellings and lingo common for a preteen child.

"This guy's asking if I'm alone now," McQuiston says. "He's already talked to me about phone sex."

The Utah attorney general's ICAC task force recently allowed a Deseret Morning News reporter and photographer to accompany officers on a Saturday night as they worked an overtime shift, serving warrants for suspected child pornography and speaking with sexual predators online.

The ICAC task force arrests more people per capita than anywhere else in the nation.

"There's a bunch of different ways to measure number one. But if you measure number one by per capita productivity, we're certainly number one," said Ken Wallentine, the chief of law enforcement for the Utah Attorney General's Office.

Deseret Morning News graphic    Text from an online chat. (Content is graphic, may be offensive to some readers.) (16kb .pdf file)

Such shocking numbers contradict Utah's reputation as a "family friendly state." ICAC authorities say the state is a target-rich environment for predators in a state that's known for its tech savvy.

"There's kids in the neighborhoods of Utah," Wallentine said. "A neighborhood chock full of kids is nirvana for a child predator."

The ICAC offices look like any other cubicle farm. Detectives have pictures of their wives and children tacked up next to computer monitors showing hard-core images and sexually explicit chats.

"We surf all chat rooms," McQuiston says. "AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, MySpace, everywhere."

A Web site address pops up in one of the chat rooms he logs into. It directs him to an innocent-looking site. However, authorities say they are called "porn bots," which can take over a computer and boot up a number of explicit sites or plant a computer virus.

Shockingly, ICAC agents said they monitor a number of highly sexual chats that take place during regular business hours from adults who are sitting at their office desks.

"If employers had any idea," McQuiston says.

No safe place

Cases begin in any manner of chat rooms — even religious-themed ones.

"You can go into a room that talks about antique cars, a room that's about sports, you can go into a room that talks about employment opportunities. Eventually they'll all want to talk about sex," he said. "The only room that we've found in the seven years of being in operation that there is no sex talk is the 'Star Trek' room."

The conversations start in a chat room and then break off into instant message conversations.