At 3:20 p.m. Wednesday, everything was normal for four people inside a house on the 100 block of south Hardy Street.
They had no idea what was about to happen to them.
At 3:21 p.m., eight Independence police officers from the department’s special response team stormed through the front door. They were armed with assault rifles, handguns and bullet proof vests.
But it wasn’t the execution of the search warrant that made this incident stand out. Police conduct search and arrest warrants all the time.
This search involved computers and digital equipment. Police had reason to believe that child pornography or other information associated with child exploitation was on the equipment.
Police seized five computers. But they declined to reveal any details with the case because it’s an ongoing investigation.
The team that discovered the possible child pornography: the Independence Police Intelligence Unit.
This special unit was created two years ago. The department received a grant from the Missouri Internet Cyber Crime grant program. The money paid for computer and electronic equipment, training and overtime for detectives.
“With that funding, we started working on becoming a proactive unit addressing child exploitation over the Internet,” said Sgt. Kevin Freeman, the leader of the unit.
The team has been specifically targeting people who exploit children in a sexual manner.
In the past 12 months, the unit has executed 82 search warrants like the one on Oct. 15 on Hardy Street.
They have 28 open criminal cases pending in the Jackson County court system.
Some of the cases include:
- Jeremy W. Clyborne, 28, of Independence, pleaded guilty to federal charges of distributing child pornography over the Internet. The unit executed a search warrant at Clyborne’s house in April 2007, where they found a computer disk containing around 300 images of child pornography, including images of prepubescent children subjected to violent and sadistic sexual abuse.
- Michael A. Stratton, 26, of Evansville, Ind., has been charged in federal court for allegedly traveling to Independence to meet a person he believed was a mother who was going to make her two children available to him for illegal sexual activity. In July he contacted an undercover officer who he thought was the mother of two children on an Internet chat room. Stratton allegedly sent the officer two videos that contained child pornography and bestiality (sex with animals).
- Ethan D. Handel, 28, a former radio announcer from Marshall, Mo., pleaded guilty in federal court for using the Internet to attempt to entice a minor to engage in illegal sexual activity. He traveled to Independence to meet someone he thought was a 14-year-old girl whom he had contacted via instant messaging. But the “girl” was really an undercover officer.
“The primary goal of the unit is to protect the children,” Freeman said.
It takes time to investigate a case to the point where charges are filed, said Independence Police Capt. Dan Cummings, who oversees the unit.
“I think you wouldn’t understand the time that it takes to investigate and find out who this guy is,” Cummings said. “It’s an unbelievable amount of work identifying the guy and finding out where he is.”
Freeman couldn’t talk details about what the unit does. But he did say that several people in Independence, along with detectives in his unit, pose as underage girls in chat rooms communicating with men who try to exploit a child.
The unit is an affiliate of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, a federally funded program. The Independence police unit follows the task force’s guidelines.
“All of our cases are law enforcement officers who are online with these individuals. We have records of everything that was said and who said it,” Freeman said. “There are so many people out there trading child pornography. And the sad as this is, most of those people who are trading the child pornography are hands-on offenders. They have molested children.”
If the unit catches them trading the material, they address it in a bigger context.
“OK, we caught you with this, what have you done?” Freeman said.
The unit knows of at least 500 different Internet provider addresses within Independence that have traded child pornography since Jan. 1, Freeman said.
If the unit stopped looking for any more child explotations this year and concentrated solely on the 500 instances and executed a search warrant each day for those cases, it would take them two years before they caught up.
“We might not have knocked on their door yet, but we do have their names,” he said.
All the crimes are serious but with so much of the material being distributed, the unit has to pick and choose what cases to pursue based on the most severe.
Detectives use undercover identities and the computers they use are impossible to trace back to the police department, where they operate from.
“We’ve seen it all,” Freeman said.
Men masterbating on live web cams to underage girls, but in reality are seasoned detectives posing as girls.
The detectives will seek whatever electronic medium Internet predators use to contact kids. Phones, web cams, chat rooms, e-mail, etc.
People have always traded child pornography but they usually traded it by mail or hand-to-hand transfers. The Internet has given pedophiles a big-time outlet to trade images, Freeman said.
Less than 2 percent of the instances of child exploitation nationwide over an electronic medium are actually prosecuted. There’s not enough resources to fully combat the problem. The unit has a slightly larger percentage, Freeman said.
“There are times in this line of work where you find yourself staring in the eyes of the children in these movies and apologizing,” said Flint Waters, a special agent with the Wyoming Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, who addressed Congress about the proliferation of child exploitation. “We’re apologizing because we can’t find them. We can’t rescue them. There’s just not enough people or resources to help.”
The three detectives and one sergeant have nine computers they use. They have specialized computers for searches and undercover computers.
They use multiple undercover identities. They use photos of men, women, boys and girls.
