Law enforcement ‘overwhelmed’ by scale of online child abuse: Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart

CHICAGO (WLS) — For months, ABC7 followed Cook County police behind closed doors, getting a behind-the-scenes look at how they track down and arrest suspected child molesters.

On Sunday night, we showed you how detectives wrapped up a months-long case and arrested a man accused of possessing and selling child pornography.

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We now speak with Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart to better understand the magnitude of this exploding crime.

“This is no longer the time of a handful of people sending each other photos through the mail,” Dart said.

Dart is irritated.

“This is something on the Internet that has exponentially declined from about 3,000 photos a year to about 50 million. It’s everywhere, and then law enforcement is inundated with it,” Dart said.

Dart has a team of investigators specifically assigned to catch people who sexually exploit children online. Since 2020, investigations by the sheriff’s Internet Crimes Against Children Unit have resulted in 49 charges being filed against people for child victimization and child pornography.

Bodycam video shows police questioning Vincent Salvaggio, who was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison last summer for sharing and possessing child pornography.

“What I’m concerned about now is what’s on your phone that doesn’t belong on your phone,” researcher Daniel Codd says in the footage.

“Can I remove a few?” Salvaggio laughs.

Salvaggio is a registered sex offender in Illinois and was convicted in North Carolina in 2010 of sexually abusing a minor.

In another arrest, the sheriff interviewed Jan Bautista, who admitted to using his cell phone to view, download, and share images and videos of children engaged in sexual acts.

“What’s the youngest you’ve seen on one of these vehicles?” asked one investigator.

“Less than 1,” Bautista replied.

Bautista was convicted but did not receive a prison sentence. Instead, he was given 30 months probation for sex offenders.

In 2023 alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) CyberTipline received 36.2 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation online.

According to NCMEC, it received 29.4 million reports in 2021, a 23% increase in just two years.

And since its founding in 1998, CyberTipline says it has received more than 180 million reports in total. By comparison, a fifth of those reports came in just last year.

“When we started this, I knew we would have some work, but I didn’t know we would have this much work. I didn’t think child pornography, child abuse material, child exploitation, I didn’t think it would get as big as it has,” said Lt. James Draz of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, Child Cyber ​​Crimes Unit.

The vast majority of reports to NCMEC come from electronic service providers. This category includes social media, cloud-based storage, and internet and mobile service providers.

“When people like me and other people sit there and say, ‘Listen, do you mind, with all these billions of dollars that you’re making, maybe you’d like to contribute a little bit to addressing this heinous crime? Don’t you feel like you have a role in this and maybe you’d like to help?’ And the answer is usually crickets,” Dart said.

According to NCMEC, U.S.-based ESPs are legally required to report child abuse material when they become aware of it. However, there are no legal obligations for those companies to proactively monitor their platforms for this type of content.

“People are talking about making changes to the law now more than ever, so now is an ideal time for people to get involved,” Dart said.

It’s been more than a decade since Congress passed meaningful legislation to protect children online. Federal laws were written on the books before Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok were even invented. But it wasn’t until this summer that two bills aimed at keeping kids safe online passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support.

“This is a historic moment. This is a moment where the Senate has said, ‘There have been terrible abuses. We have to put an end to them, and we will,'” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The bills now go to the House of Representatives, where they will not be considered until September at the earliest.

Snap, X and Microsoft have endorsed the Kids Online Safety Act. But free speech advocates, other tech companies including Facebook’s parent company Meta, and internet lobby groups say the bills threaten freedom of expression online. And while politicians and powerful officials in Washington fight each other, the Cook County sheriff is going after suspected child molesters one by one.

“We’re going to catch people. Are we going to catch everybody? No, of course not. Are we going to catch an individual who thinks he’s going to be safe? Yes, we will, and we have, we’ll continue to do that,” Dart said.

Dart hopes that people will learn from this that child sexual exploitation takes many forms and is extremely common.

He said if people better understand what law enforcement is dealing with and what’s going on online and in our communities, they can take their concerns to lawmakers and prioritize this issue at the ballot box.