Funding cuts will cripple Cyber Crimes Task Force

POPLAR BLUFF -- Authorities say drastic cuts in funding for the Southeast Missouri Cyber Crimes Task Force is crippling the work it can do investigating online predators targeting Missouri's children.

The task force, based at the Poplar Bluff Police Department, was formed in 2007 as a means to fight online criminals who often seek to entice children and deal in child pornography.

Given the current funding trend, police officials say the unit may be forced to disband, leaving not only the department, but also other agencies in its 13-county service area, in a lurch.

Since its inception, the unit's funding has been reduced substantially.

In its early years, the task force received in excess of $100,000 annually in state and federal funding. Three years ago its received $10,000.

Expecting to again receive $5,000 this year, police officials were notified last week that amount had been cut by half.

The $5,000 "didn't cover the manpower that it takes to do all the reporting (of statistics), so $2,500 is a slap in the face," said Deputy Police Chief Jeff Rolland.

The task force, according to Capt. David Sutton, was organized with the help of then Missouri Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) commander Lt. Joe Laramie with the Glendale Police Department.

"At that time, we got quite a bit of financial support from Missouri ICAC (which) is funded by grants through the federal department's Department of Justice," said Sutton.

After Laramie's retirement in 2010, control of ICAC was transferred to Lt. Chris Mateja with the St. Charles County Police Department, Sutton said.

The change "was not good for us," Sutton said. "The funding was drastically cut. Fortunately, we were able to get funding through the Missouri Department of Public Safety through a state grant."

In June, Sutton said, Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed $1.5 million in funding for the Missouri State Cyber Crimes Grant, which was used for the regional task forces across the state.

Nixon, according to Sutton, has "demonstrated he's anti-law enforcement in the last six months.

"The amount of money that the legislature requested is not enough to place the Missouri budget in peril. It was $1.5 million dollars out of a ($27.7 billion) budget."

This funding cut, "I don't even have a word for how much it puts our community at risk," Rolland said.

People, he said, need to remember why these task forces were set up.

The whole purpose was to put the investigative abilities and the massive amount of "high-tech equipment it takes to investigate these cases out into the rural areas of the State of Missouri," Rolland said.

Upon it's inception, it was successful, he said.

"We had funding in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide training and equipment to capture these animals," Rolland said.

Now, the funding has been "pulled back into the major cities leaving the rural communities at risk," Rolland said. "What's just insane about this is the people in the large metropolitan areas that are taking all the funding push these investigations down to us (because) they are in our geographical boundaries."

ICAC investigators don't come to Southeast Missouri to work the cases, he said.

"They leave that to us, and they've cut our funding," he said. "So, the mind set is: we're not going to fund you, but we expect you to keep doing the same things you've been doing."

Prior to having the regional task forces, devices had been sent off to federal investigators in St. Louis for forensic examinations.

"The system was broke," Rolland said. "The federal system was overloaded, and we fixed the system.

"Now, politics have crept into it again, and it's broke, and who pays the price, the taxpayers, and how they pay that price is their children (possibly becoming) a victim of a heinous crime while politicians play games with money that isn't theirs."

Being able to investigate, arrest and bring "these individuals to justice depends on that funding, depends on that continual purchase of highly sophisticated, technical equipment and keeping our detectives current and trained on the latest technology and latest trends that sexual predators use to exploit our children," Rolland said.

Why anyone in Jefferson City "would not want to support helping us take a bunch of perverts off the street and put them in prison, as far as I'm concerned, for the rest of their life, is beyond me," said Chief Danny Whiteley.

Anyone not supporting funding for this type of program, Whiteley said, is either a "politically-correct coward, or they support perverts and child molesters."

The task force, Sutton said, gets dozens of reports every year from the National Center for Missing and Exploited children to investigate, as well as referrals from ICAC.

"These reports involve child pornography and child predators trying to make contact with children on the Internet," he said.

The local task force, he said, investigated 62 enticement or child porn complaints last year.

That number, Sutton said, does not include the assistance provided to other agencies in examining computers or cellphones connected to child sexual abuse cases.

Cyber crimes investigations are not all local investigations as they cross "all jurisdictional boundaries," Sutton said.

Rolland agreed.

It encompasses investigations such as the sharing of child porn over the Internet to enticement cases, where "sexual predators from outside the area travel to this area to sexually abuse children within our jurisdictional boundaries," Rolland said.

This includes what Rolland called the "most heinous of evil cases (such) as Jeffery Shelton," who kidnapped and raped two young Butler County girls and used a cellphone to capture the abuse.

The number of cases, Sutton said, always is increasing due to technological advancements and that technology being placed into the hands of younger children.

"We will continue to see an exponential increase in the number of referrals we get every year," Sutton said. "Without the funding from the state, we are simply not going to be able to investigate these crimes all over Southeast Missouri."

Technological advancements also mean examination equipment has to keep pace.

The last "machine" bought for the unit's use, Sutton said, cost $12,000, and annual software license renewals run between $10,000 and $12,000 for the machines.

"To set up a forensic examination machine, with buying the piece of equipment and licensing, is about in the $24,000 range, and that's good for a year, 12 to 18 months max, then technology has outpaced it," Rolland said.

The unit, Sutton said, will "limp along" until a machine goes down or a software license can't be renewed by the department.

If forensics exams can no longer be done in house by the task force investigators, Sutton said, other options include the Missouri State Technical Assistance Team (STAT) or the Missouri State Highway Patrol.

Sutton said STAT currently has a 12- to 18-month back log on examinations, and the patrol has one lab in Jeff City.

If "forced to rely" on STAT or the patrol, "it will just add to that back log because they are already overwhelmed," Sutton said. "Waiting that long for the forensic exams could kill the investigations."