DALLAS – Somewhere in North Texas tonight, a child is being exploited online, and a tip that could be a lifeline is sitting in a queue. Behind that tip is a name, a face, a set of small hands…and a ticking clock. Every day that tip sits in a file is a day a child remains in harm’s way, another day an offender can continue to commit unspeakable crimes, and one more day that a family remains unaware that their child is the target of a terrible threat.
“When we talk about a ‘backlog,’ we’re not talking about paperwork – we’re talking about children,” said Nate Davis, Vice President of North America Operations for Our Rescue. “When communities look away, when the crisis of human trafficking and child exploitation goes unchecked, that backlog doesn’t shrink. It grows. And the vulnerable children caught up in it are the ones who suffer most.”
The operation in Texas brought law enforcement agencies together with specialized teams and resources, detectives, members of Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) task forces and Electronic Storage Detection (ESD) K9s and their handlers.
“I do this job for one reason: everything that we do in ICAC is to protect children,” said Landon Cooksey, a Detective and ESD K9 handler with the Dallas Police Department. “The ultimate goal isn’t to put people in jail, it’s to protect children. Putting people in jail accomplishes part of that goal, but our one main goal – if you ask any detective here – is to protect children.”
ESD K9s Play Critical Role in Operation Soteria Shield II
What happened in North Texas is significant, added Davis. Over two months, 91 law enforcement agencies and nearly 200 investigators, forensic examiners, prosecutors and victim advocates converged for a single mission: Operation Soteria Shield II. This field operation resulted in the rescue of 89 children from online sexual exploitation and led to over 270 arrests with more than 400 state and federal charges, including charges of production and distribution of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), human trafficking, and online solicitation. It is one of the largest coordinated child-safety operations in the region’s history, led by the North Texas Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force and the FBI Dallas Division.
Detective and ESD K9 handler, Mike Fontenot, with Dallas PD, said, “We’re all seasoned. (…) We have done hundreds and hundreds of search warrants. We’ve looked through every type of house imaginable and today, we isolated where the suspect was – where all of his evidence is going to be.”
Finding evidence that may be critical to a case can be difficult, especially when criminals have expertly hidden storage devices in walls, floorboards, or behind electrical outlets or in piles of clutter in a closet, drawer, garage, or backyard shed. Our Rescue ESD K9s undergo extensive training with Jordan Detection K9 in Indianapolis and that training makes them force magnifiers in the field.
Detective Cooksey said his ESD K9, Dutch, once found a USB drive (thumb drive) that was disguised as a crayon. ESD K9 Remi once scratched down into a pile of trash and pulled out a 500-gig internal hard drive that contained thousands of CSAM images. Perpetrators may think they have successfully concealed electronic evidence, but they’re no match for ESD K9 units.
“We spent four hours there, systematically tearing everything down to make sure we didn’t’ miss anything. I brought my dog (ESD K9) in, ran her for five minutes and she already hit on a 60-gigabyte hard drive that we had missed,” added Fontenot.
When Detective Fontenot joined the ICAC task force five years ago, the vast majority of phones they were finding stored between 16-18 gigs of data.
“Already over the last month, we processed ten, one-terabyte phones,” he said. “With one PC, it was ten terabytes or 4.6 million video image files that we have to categorize and go through. People don’t realize the amount of data that we’re dealing with…drowning in.”
“Today, eighty-nine children are no longer suffering the indignity of being sexually exploited at the hands of someone they trusted,” said Davis. “The success of this operation is due to the countless hours of dedicated work from the men and women of law enforcement, and the incredible coordination and partnership that brought so many resources together. Our Rescue is proud to have played a supportive role in this effort.”
“We were investigating a domestic terrorist group that preys on children online,” recalled Detective Cooksey of a previous operation. “They solicit children to abuse other children and to send it to them (the terrorists) and then they blackmail children and get them to harm themselves (…) it’s an evil, evil organization.”
Cooksey noted the initial human search didn’t find the box of USB drives that he and Dutch found which contained CSAM evidence that resulted in a case against the criminals.
Join The Fight
“Our Rescue’s contribution to this field is critical,” he added. “Having an ESD K9 provided by Our Rescue has made a huge difference. (Dutch) directly affects children being rescued, being helped from abuse, from child sexual exploitation and preventing children from being abused. It’s a mammoth thing for us – a huge contribution for us and we can’t express enough how big of a role that (Dutch) plays in rescuing children.”
Six total ESD K9s from Our Rescue participated in Operation Soteria Shield II.
Behind the scenes of the operation is a quieter story about a four-year partnership between anti-trafficking nonprofit Our Rescue and the ICAC task forces that made an operation of this magnitude possible.
Keeping Up with Demand
Across the nation, ICAC task forces are woefully underfunded and overworked. In Texas, there are three of these task forces and hundreds of affiliates, yet the number of cyber tips received by the North Texas ICAC Task Force each year is 60,000, and 30,000 of those are in the City of Dallas alone. This yearly volume dwarfs law enforcement staffing levels, capabilities, and resources. Our Rescue, fueled by donations from generous supporters, is working to level this inequity. And Operation Soteria Shield II is, in part, a demonstration of this work.
Kristin Alvarado, Police Sergeant and North Texas ICAC Commander with Dallas PD said the number of cyber tips the department received this year had doubled from last year. She said six detectives triaged over 57,000 tips last year and the year before that it was only 30,000, “a lot of work for just six individuals.”
Our Rescue’s role in supporting the ICAC task force and in donating ESD K9s to the department has made an impact on many people, according to the officers.
“It’s something a lot of agencies can’t afford or they can’t do it by themselves,” said Alvarado. “The fact that this organization steps in and says hey, we’re going to help you all out, in multiple ways…they just step up and say, ‘let’s see what we can do.’ Anyone that chooses to give to this organization is choosing to give to a very good cause.”
Since the program’s inception in 2017, Our Rescue has provided 162 ESD K9s to law enforcement agencies across the U.S., Canada, and around the world. We believe they are force magnifiers and the feedback we hear from police officers and investigators is that these K9 superheroes are not only making an impact on children’s lives and child exploitation cases, but they are also a force for good in the communities they serve and are leaving positive “pawprints” wherever they go.
