A single detective sits before a sea of computer screens and media servers, surrounded by stacks of case files and hard drives, all while chipping away at a backlog that will take months—if not years—to clear. Each drive holds horrific digital evidence of child exploitation. The thousands of files represent just as many victims, with images the officer will never unsee.
“Most departments only have one or two ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) specialists, where they might have 30 officers working drug cases,” said Nate Davis, VP of North American operations at Our Rescue and a former law enforcement officer. “I’ve never talked to a department that said they were fully staffed.”
The United States has waged a “war on drugs” for decades, deploying federal funding in full force to battle this epidemic. In 2025, the White House requested more than $44 billion to address the opioid crisis and broader illicit drug use, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. By comparison, ICAC units nationwide will receive roughly $40 million this year.
The thousand-to-one funding gap reveals two American crises—one in the headlines and the one in the shadows. Drug crimes dot street corners, play out in bodycam footage and dominate the nightly news. The public outcry reaches legislatures and courtrooms, sparking policy change. Yet online exploitation happens out of public view, in secret spaces online.
“It’s very easy to turn a blind eye to an uncomfortable subject like this because it’s so abhorrent. It is difficult for societies and people to have polite conversation around,” said John Trenary, Our Rescue’s VP of Cyber, who has worked on both drug task forces and child exploitation cases. “It’s not in our face. We’re not confronted by an obvious person who is strung out on heroin coming up to our car and trying to get money.”
The Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force Program is a U.S. Department of Justice program uniting 61 task forces nationwide to combat online child exploitation, focusing on crimes like child sexual abuse material (CSAM), trafficking, and sextortion. This ballooning crisis, stacked against law enforcement’s limited capacity, represents an imbalance of funding, staffing, technology, and public perception. As a result, many ICAC investigators are stretched, and often reassigned to routine duties when public emergencies hit.
“When a storm comes through or a major event happens, they’re pulled off their cases and put out there for frontline work,” Davis said.
Technology Gaps Grow
From expensive forensic software to data servers and tech-savvy analysts with the skills to interpret digital evidence, the technology needed to crack these crimes has far outpaced the resources to fight them.
From his vantage point inside the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybercrime Center, Deputy Special Agent in Charge Mike Prado sees a widening divide between national capabilities and the strained local task forces on the front lines of child exploitation cases.
“We’re a very well-resourced federal agency, but local ICACs are not,” said Prado, of the C3 Center. “A child shouldn’t have to rely on the fact that they live in a zip code that’s more resourced than the one a county over.”
Meanwhile, the backlog cases keep growing and every tip unopened is a child that could be saved. In 2024, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children CyberTipline received 20.5 million reports related to 29.2 million incidents of suspected child sexual exploitation, which included 62-million files.
In Vancouver, Washington, Sgt. Julie Ballou oversees the Digital Evidence Cyber Crime Unit at the Vancouver Police Department. She says her detectives are often just playing catchup, without the time to research the newest platform that offers access to kids. This leaves officers to try to share intel nationally with other departments.
“If you think about the thousands of cyber tips that come into, not just our agency but statewide, and I have two digital forensic investigators and they do work not just for our team, but for our entire agency,” said Sgt. Ballou. And so it is really overwhelming to do one search warrant and come out with so many devices and know which one is going to have the evidence that the prosecutor needs.”
Recently, Our Rescue spoke with the Harding University Digital Forensics Lab, which estimates two to five hard drives can take almost 70 hours to search. Many law enforcement agencies don’t have their in-house forensic labs and have to send the material to state facilities to be processed, which can take even longer.
“Twenty years ago, child exploitation cases weren’t all that expensive to investigate,” said Bill Walker, senior VP of law enforcement enterprise and operations at Our Rescue and a 27-year veteran of Homeland Security Investigations. “Today the delta is, on any given search warrant, investigators are walking away with three, four or 10 media devices. You have to get into those devices, analyze what’s there and find the needle in the haystack.”
Empowering the Frontlines
Recruiting talented investigators to find that needle can be challenging. Officers know the toll for the type of cases ICAC units investigate. The days are long, with heavy caseloads and exposure to traumatic content impacting their mental health. Research shows investigators who review CSAM experience significantly higher levels of secondary trauma and stress than other law enforcement peers. Sgt. Ballou added that wellness and mental health is a main priority for her ICAC detectives in Vancouver.
“With ICAC, it takes a tech-savvy person to do a lot of that investigation,” Davis said. “You could attract talented people, but you can’t attract talented people on a police salary. That’s the problem. You’ve got to have purpose and real passion and commitment. In most police academies, human trafficking gets an hour or two, if that. Child exploitation often isn’t even mentioned.”
The challenges are systemic and deep, which is why Our Rescue steps in to fill the delta by cutting through red tape, boosting limited budgets and providing tools, tactical training and mental health support to empower investigators. When officers receive this training, the impact is immediate. A police captain recently reached out to Our Rescue when his team was eager to attend an undercover training that began Monday. The department had no budget to send them. Within 24 hours, Our Rescue completed its vetting process, secured funding and booked hotel rooms for the officers.
Our Rescue cultivates and maintains close partnerships with technology companies focused on the development of software and hardware tools that aim to streamline child exploitation investigations. This engagement provides Our Rescue with the unique opportunity to rapidly deploy cutting-edge technology into the hands of child exploitation crime-fighters. As predators and technology evolve, so too does Our Rescue’s laser-focused efforts. Through these cohesive efforts, Our Rescue equips investigators with the tools they need to accomplish their mission of sparing children from exploitation.
In addition to training and technology, one of Our Rescue’s flagship programs funds ESD (Electronic Storage Detection) K9s. These highly trained dogs are invaluable in helping to recover critical evidence in Child Exploitation Cases across 38 states and eight countries. ESD dogs are trained to sniff out the chemical compounds in hard drives and other digital devices, helping investigators find evidence faster.
“If I’m serving a search warrant, it would take two investigators four hours to dismantle that room and comb through it to see if there’s any evidence, or it would take a dog five minutes to go through that room,” said Davis. “It’s the speed in which we can assist the police. We’ve seen it happen where someone leaves a training session and that same night recognizes a trafficking victim they would have missed before.”
ESD K9s often serve as therapy or comfort dogs for victims of crimes, but also for law enforcement units. For officers facing traumatic cases day after day, these highly trained dogs bring light into a dark topic daily.
Investing in Officers: ICAC Connect
Our Rescue’s new ICAC Connect program is a solution designed to link donors directly with the 61 Internet Crimes Against Children task forces across the US. Its mission, to empower and equip the law enforcement heroes, fighting everyday, to protect our children. The program connects community members to specific law enforcement needs whether it’s outdated technology, a case backlog or a lack of training and channels donor dollars to address them.
“We don’t invest in police departments; we invest in the officers,” Davis said. “The ICAC Connect program is restricted money that goes directly back into your community, so you know that the money you give is helping protect children where you live.”
As technology evolves faster than laws or budgets can keep pace, innovation and partnerships may be the greatest hope for closing the disparity. For those leading the fight at Our Rescue, the hope is one day, the small but mighty warriors who battle in the shadows will finally be fought with equal force and the delta will disappear.
“The beauty of Our Rescue is that in this space we introduce new and emerging technologies that traditional law enforcement agencies may not have the resources to procure. We can see what really is working. If it’s going to let them rescue more children or arrest more pedophiles, they’re going to take us up on that, and that’s the residual churn that we’d like to see,” said Walker.
