Child porn caseload heavy for Utah team

First, there's the good news — child pornography investigators are busier than ever in Utah. Then, there's the bad news — child pornography investigators are busier than ever in Utah.

Officials say they can hardly keep up with the caseload of child pornography cases.

"I could use half a dozen (extra) investigators," Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff said.

The Attorney General's Office is part of the multiagency Utah Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force that investigates child pornography cases in the state. Since its inception in January 2000, the task forcetask force has been very busy.

In 2001, the task force worked 163 child pornography cases — including 45 traveler, 17 producer, 18 seller, and 15 trader cases. The group made 48 arrests and served 169 subpoenas.

So far this year, task force agents have investigated 53 cases and made 14 arrests.

Although the 2002 numbers are lower than last year's, task force director Lt. Ken Hansen offers the following caveat: "Our stats are way down because during the months of January and February we only had one agent online."

The task force normally has five full-time agents on the Internet "flushing out online predators," Hansen said.

It is through this proactive work that agents find adults who target children in chat rooms, as well as those who offer pornographic material for selling or trading online.

Essentially, this year's numbers represent only the three months since the end of the 2002 Winter Olympics, when agents were assigned to other duties. Since then, however, agents have investigated nine "traveler" cases — where adults travel to meet children they met online or send the child an airplane or bus ticket to meet them.

"Since the Olympics, every time we've gone on the Internet we've had an arrest," Shurtleff said.

Utah's task force is one of 30 throughout the United States. It is also one of the busiest.

"Our goal is to remove all child pornography from the Internet," Hansen said. "Now, that's a pretty monumental task, but at least we're trying."

While those involved in prosecuting child pornography may not know exactly what to attribute the increasing caseload to, one thing is clear — many citizens are doing their part to battle the problem.