Ohio Cops Respond To Online Sexual Exploitation Report By Offering To Arrest The 11-Year-Old Victim
from the when-in-doubt,-target-the-weakest-person-first dept
The most cynical take on this period of historic lows in US crime rates isn’t that we’ve locked up so many people that most crime now takes place in prisons where no one cares (or tabulates) how many criminal acts are still being committed.
No, the most cynical take is this: people just got sick of reporting crimes just to have disinterested cops show up and shrug their way through the victim’s statements, making it clear they didn’t care much about solving the crime and/or providing any assistance to the victims.
Even the crimes cops care about — the ones that make headlines — are crimes cops aren’t all that great at solving. In some cities, the odds are better than a coin flip that the perp will get away with literal murder.
Most law enforcement activities now go where the money’s at: drug interdictment. And they don’t really care about the drug trafficking. They only care how much cash they can take from motorists or how good they look after stumbling into a massive drug haul while trolling the highways for loose cash.
And that’s on top of the massive backlogs of untested rape kits and law enforcement’s general unwillingness to take domestic violence seriously because that would mean placing a whole lot of sworn police officers behind bars.
Calling the cops to report a crime doesn’t tend to result in a flurry of helpful activity from the Thin Blue Line. Even at the best of times, it was ridiculous to assume cops could handle all the crime reports they received. In times like these — when cops are walking off the job rather than subject themselves to the barest minimum of accountability — the likelihood of any reported crime being dealt with, much less solved, continues to drop.
And here we have another data point — one captured on a private citizen’s camera — that shows cops don’t care much about crime that might involve them having to investigate something or, at the very least, help out a troubled parent. This is the sort of thing we’re becoming numb to, as cops tend to view people reporting crimes as nuisances, rather than valued members of the public they’re supposed to be proud to serve. (h/t Robby Soave/Reason)
A concerned parent called the Columbus, Ohio police department at 6 pm after discovering his 11-year-old daughter had been sending explicit pictures to an adult she had met online. The police response was captured by his doorbell camera, making it impossible for the involved officers to claim they weren’t involved or, at best, had been misquoted.
The father expressed his concern to the officers and suggested they might want to speak to his daughter to impress on her the potential danger of her contact with this person. This is what he got from the cops:
“She’s in bed now,” the man said. The audio is briefly inaudible as he opens the door.
“It still happened, though, right?” the female officer said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, the whole point, I just wanted you guys to come over and talk to her,” the man said. “I just want her to realize what this was. I mean, reality is not much I probably can do about it, is there?”
“I mean, she can probably get charged with child porn,” the female officer replied.
“Who, she can?” the man said. “She’s 11 years old.”
“She’s creating it, right?” the female officer said.
The man repeats himself: “She’s 11 years old.”
“Doesn’t matter. She’s still making porn.“
“No, she’s not,” the man said. “She’s being manipulated by a grown (explitive) adult on the internet.”
“Is she taking pictures, though?”
The man dismisses the officers: “You guys have a nice evening,” and starts to head inside the house. “Thank you for coming.”
He turns to say something else. “Are you serious? Have a nice evening.”
Sweet holy fuck. If this were the medical field, it would be malpractice. Neither cop offered to use their vast stores of “training and experience” to speak to the child to explain how dangerous interactions like these might me. Neither officer even bothered to ask if there was any information the parent might have gathered or might be present on his daughter’s devices that might help identify the person soliciting explicit pictures from a minor.
Nope. The cops seemed to feel the best way to handle this was tell a distraught father they could, if they so desired, arrest his daughter for the crime of [checks recording] being sexually exploited by an adult. That’s the best these two could come up with after waiting six hours to respond to an actual, live CSAM report.
Presumably, none of this made its way into the officers’ report on this incident. If it had, one would assume an investigation would have been opened before the parent’s video went viral on social media. Then again, maybe it did make its way into the report and the officers involved (along with the officers they shared it with) all had a good laugh.
Either way, these officers are under investigation now. The PD’s Inspector General is digging into this after receiving several complaints from “citizens” no doubt located all over the internet as a result of this viral video.
Better yet, the PD has put Sexual Assault Unit detectives on the case to identify and locate the person soliciting photos from the 11-year-old — something the responding officers should have done, rather than tell a parent the best way through this might be to arrest his daughter for creating child porn.
Cops aren’t regular people, folks. They will say the stupidest thing imaginable because their brains don’t work like ours do. Even if we thought something like this, we would never say anything like this to a parent concerned about his child being sexually exploited. But for cops, it’s whatever crime is easiest to solve. And, in this case, it the was the “production” of CSAM by an 11-year-old, never mind that it would never have happened if it weren’t for the efforts of the adult on the other end of the internet connection.
Filed Under: csam, ohio, police, sexual exploitation
Comments on “Ohio Cops Respond To Online Sexual Exploitation Report By Offering To Arrest The 11-Year-Old Victim”
The suggestion that she could be charged should only be uttered in the same breath as lamenting the cruelty and stupidity of the (in)justice system, not because it’s a legitimate charge to bring against a victim.
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It’s a potential event that I would argue they absolutely need to be aware of.
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Also, we don’t have a justice system. We have a legal system.
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“We have a legal system.”
that can be bribed
Rule of law for the unwashed masses, rule of man for the uber rich.
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Well, what do you expect?
Cops are trained to arrest people. They aren’t trained as child psychologists. They offered what they were competent at. If he had wanted the guy to be identified and apprehended, he could have said so.
Frankly, the stupid starts here even before the cops reply and pile it on.
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More like it continues with your unconditional excusing of the cops.
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Your reading comprehension didn’t even make it to the end of the sentence that you quoted only in part?
Though I have to suspect that your selective quoting was intentional disingenuousness as the cutoff point seems deliberate.
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I read you comment all the way, and it is stupid in that
is not all that cops are, or should be trained to do. Interviewing witnesses and victims of crime should be part of their job.
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First: The call was placed at 6pm. The knock on the door was at midnight. You might have missed that.
Sure, the father could have explicitly said what he was hoping the cops would do. And when the call was made, that was probably the idea. But a) it was too F—ing late at night for that sort of shit, and b) the cops weren’t on board with it anyway.
So “cops aren’t child psychologists” is also off the table as any sort of coherent argument.
From TFA:
So yeah. What the officers should have been competent at: to understand that they had a Sexual Assault Unit in their department. To know when to call for advice if they don’t know how to handle a situation that doesn’t involve exigent circumstances and gun play. To know when Dispatch has sent them on an errand they can’t resolve at that time, or to offer to come back during reasonable hours.
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sadly the childs life is fucked over
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Not if the parents do everything they can to obstruct prosecutors
If I were her daddy would be breaking into the DA’s office computter network, going into the folder of the prosecutor assigned to the case and erasing everything in it to erase documents related to that.
I would love to see the look on the face of the prosecutor assigned to the case when went to pull up his folder on the office computer network and found everything was gone and that his case was pretty much torpedoed
If that were my little girl, that is what I would do. I would do anything to protect her, legal or not.
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you been told that committing a federal crime is bad listen to the people that are right or you will make your childs life worse
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am sorry but you are a low life troll that wants reactions
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Cool story bro.
Re: I learned that policemen are my friends / I learned that justice never ends
I was taught in elementary school that yes, in fact, I could go talk to a police officer about any of my woes, especially if it involved adults engaging in abuse.
I’m pretty sure the facade is perpetuated in police outreach, and in media like television and movies. I suspect any officer in a series by Dick Wolf would either be able to talk to a child about an abuse situation or would direct them to a child specialist SVU.
So yeah, there’s a huge propaganda machine still telling us in 2023 that the father did the right thing, and that you can trust a law enforcement officer to handle a child victim situation with care and tact.
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Get fucked.
Calling the cops, because a sexual crime was being committed against an 11 year old is NOT FUCKING STUPID you predator.
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No, they aren’t trained as child psychologists. They are supposed to interview witnesses and collect evidence, though, not just arrest people. Why the officer didn’t offer to do either of those things is beyond me. You don’t need to be a child psychologist to realize that telling the father his child could be arrested for being exploited this way is a really stupid idea.
And why, pray tell, would that not have been obvious? Why would the first thing to pop into the officer’s mind be that the father wanted his 11-year-old daughter to be arrested for being exploited to send sexual images of herself rather than to go after the guy exploiting his little girl?
Once the officer suggested that the girl could be arrested for this, the father would reasonably conclude that he should leave because the officer would be more interested in arresting his daughter than helping her or going after the real criminal. Moreover, over 6 hours passed between the call—where the reason would have been given—and the officer’s arrival, and the father was explaining what was going on to the officer when the offer to arrest the girl came up. It’s plausible that, up until that point, the father had intended to tell the officer what he wanted out of the visit.
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Are you seriously claiming he should’ve had to specifically request this outcome, as opposed to the cops immediately realizing they needed to catch an active predator? Really?!
This entire article is a truly sad commentary on the state of “justice” in the United States. Incompetent, self-interested, lazy, discriminatory, corrupt… oh, hell, there are just too many ways to label this crap.
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Dad is part of the problem
The cops were awful. But dad asked them over to try to scare the kid straight, and they went with it.
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Scaring the kid straight might work at 6 in the evening. It would be fucking terrifying at midnight. And in this case, the cops were angling for an arrest and the father could see it.
That right there is the Sound of Freedom
As much as I dislike cops in general, I wouldn’t say that a (polite) warning would have been unwarranted. It wouldn’t be the first time a kid was given a felony and sex offender status for taking pictures of themselves.
“If we pursue this, your kid may end up being a felon and a sex offender at 11 years old” is definitely something I would want to be made aware of up-front. At the end of the day, prosecutors, not the officers, are going to be the ones who decide whether CSAM laws are going to be abused in this case. The cops don’t make the laws. The cops don’t press the charges. Do we want the cops to just skip over the potential negatives and pretend not to understand? Let the victims get caught flat-footed if a prosecutor decides to revictimize them, the way they’ve done repeatedly throughout the nation?
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Get the fuck out of there with this bullshit justification for horrific threats by the folks that should be investigating her exploitation. It’s bullshit. You’re trash.
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So you do just want the victims surprised when prosecutors decide to charge them?
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You’re not real bright, are you?
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She’s eleven fucking years old. She needs education of the dangers, not a threat of punishment.
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Prosecutors are one of the dangers.
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What is her father doing about it?
He should be doing everything to obstruct prosecutors
He should be breaking in to the DAs computer network and tashing it and run them up a bit repair bill to get it fixed.
I would do everything to obstruct prodecutors to protect her
I would protec my kids by any means legal or not
You bring your kids into the world you protect them no matter what a takes
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and that’s how you get shot dead before you even do anything maybe not do that
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Not if you grab his gun and take it away from him
If I saw a cop pintba gun at anyone in.my family I would grab onto it and tear it out of his hand and then destroy it
Use an angle grinder to cut up and destroy his gun then hand him back his destroyed and let it be known that it you piny a gun at anyone in my family it will be taken away and destroyed
That cop would then have to buy himself a new gun at his expense
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You certainly have an active imagination.
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What you domis have a fast car and a way to jam.theirvradio frequencies. Then you put your kid the the car, turn on your jammer and take off
If their radios are jammed any pursuing police unit would not be able to call for backup
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There are ways to be effective in asymmetrical conflicts. None of those ways are contained in this word salad.
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So, your response is to… commit federal crimes and ensure you’re not in a position to protect them?
I understand the emotional response, but that’s not a good idea.
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It’s not due to an emotional response, that’s one of TD’s crazier trolls and they give that sort of ‘advice’ on a regular basis.
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Just throw the computer in the river to deep six the evidence
No evidence, no.cade
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No, his response is simply to troll the comments.
Cops.
We need to be able to hack any phone to get child sex offenders.
Also cops.
Maybe we should just blame the victim and arrest them instead of going after the actual criminal.
All other cops, nope no problem with that.
This is of course the same cops that kill someone over a tail light.
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This isn’t a “cops” problem. This is a “legislators, prosecutors, and judges” problem.
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Who keeps telling all those people that they need to be able to break more of our rights ALL the time so solve cases like this?
Oh right, cops.
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I don’t think cops are responsible for our broad CSAM laws. I don’t think cops are responsible for prosecutors’ decisions to abuse them. I don’t think cops are responsible for judges’ decisions to allow such charges to proceed.
There are a lot of reasons to get down on cops. Cops absolutely do lobby for ever greater restrictions of our freedoms.
That’s not what’s going on in this case though. What you’re talking about here specifically isn’t even tangentially related to the topic at hand.
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I agree: Cops aren’t responsible for overbroad CSAM laws. Legislatures are.
I disagree: Prosecutors absolutely are responsible for their decisions to abuse them. It’s called “Prosecutorial Discretion” for a reason.
But I still agree that legislatures, having seen prosecutorial abuse, should narrow the laws.
But (as with prosecutors, cops, elected judges) it is hard to explain to the public that you are not “soft on crime” by doing so.
Because ultimately, the responsibility is on us.
'Calling the cops': For when a situation isn't bad enough already
I’m struggling to think of a move and law more beneficial to sexual predators of children but damn if I’m not coming up blank.
Arresting and charging the kid in a case like this merely sends the message to any parents that if you think your kid is being blackmailed into sending nude pics to someone try to get them to stop by all means but never call the cops, because while that leaves a sexual predator on the loose at least your kid won’t end up with a life-ruining felony on their record before they’re even old enough to drive.
Re: Never call the cops
In the United States, I really can’t imagine a situation improved by notifying law enforcement.
…maybe the same situation in which you might call for artillery or an air strike on your own position.
I have heard there are neighborhoods who are more afraid of the cops than the street gangs.
The mob takes better care of the neighborhoods than the local government.
cops are just another gang of criminals.
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The whole point of a protection racket is that you pay one organized crime syndicate that will then strive to keep other gangs off their turf. The payment structure for police is somewhat decentralized and the rates are fixed, though things like civil asset holdups are used for local collection services and lawsuit settlements cause ad-hoc expenses.
The idea is that payments are commensurate with business operations and personal income though beyond a certain wealth and sophistication, tax loopholes for offloading the expenses are available.
“Is she taking pictures, though?” You can almost hear the unbridled glee in the cop’s voice trying her best not to pee herself. Good golly gumdrops, I get to arrest an 11 year old tonight!
I think we know by now that by far, most cops are throwbacks to the Great Apes. Decades ago, my ex & I were awakened in the middle of the night by our cute, petite young (our age) next door neighbor, distressed from being locked out of her condo by some clown she brought home from a bar (certainly not the wisest move on her part). She asked for a boost into her bathroom window; I complied, then almost immediately heard her blood-curdling scream from the front of the building. I ran around to the front, to see her with blood dribbling down into her face from the top of her head. Turns out young Casanova had gone after her with his very own set of numchuks, taking a chunk out of her scalp as a result. I brought her in to clean her up, as the ex called 911. I could tell by the resignation in the ex’s voice, she was being given the bum’s rush. She hung up and informed us that the stalwart pigs would show up, maybe, sometime in the late afternoon to “take a report”. So I called 911, to lie my ass off about having “just heard a gunshot” out front. Sho ’nuff, the cops showed up ten minutes later, and actually caught the guy. A month or so later I testified against him in his assault trial, and he was actually sent up the river for a couple of years with Bubba and Leroy, as he most certainly deserved. But I’ll never get over the fact that I had to completely fabricate the story–then testify to it under oath–to assure that this clown got what he objectively deserved, and that the overpaid “finest” in cool uniforms actually did their fucking job, for their six-figure salaries. (Of course, back in that day, if someone had called to report me smoking a joint by the pool, the cops would’ve materialized in FIVE minutes, and I’d probably still be in jail.) Meanwhile our neighbor heeded my counsel & wisely stopped bringing home strange guys on Friday nights, and showed her gratitude by taking my ex & me out for a high-stepping fancy night on the town, a couple of months later.
Cops are complicit
What do you want to bet that in the over-six-hours the cops had to look at this before threatening to arrest an 11-year-old, they discovered the adult culprit was either one of their own or a well-connected person they wanted to protect? I would wager that’s very probable.
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What’s the bet the cops were hoping they’d get their hands on the girl’s pics as “evidence” to share all around the department?
I can't believe some of the statements here
Trying to blame the father because he is seeking help from a public servant? Are you kidding?
1. It is the responsibility of the police to know the law and recognize an issue. No matter what the father is requesting, IT IS NOT HIS RESPONSIBILITY to tell the police how to do their frigging job.
2. If the police were doing their job, they would recognize an issue that requires another part of their organization. They should have immediately recognized this and called in the right people. The Columbus police acknowledge this in their follow up.
3. So you all are saying if I go to the police because I think someone committed a fraud when they beat the crap out of me. And since it was not fraud but another crime, they should ignore that and walk away. What is wrong with you people?
Geez.
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It is also his responsibility to realize that cops in his country have ZERO desire to help him.
You might want to read up on Techdirt’s coverage of cop bullshit…
I'm surprised
Given all too many stories about police officer’s actions, I’m rather surprised that this story didn’t end with the parent charged with obstructing an investigation on an accused child pornographer. And of course having the child as well being arrested for producing the child pornography.
O: So, based upon what you’ve said, we have reason to believe that child pornography is being produced within this dwelling.
P: Nevermind officer, just go away.
O: We can’t do that. Now step aside, or you’ll be charged with obstructing an investigation.
…
surprised those cops didn’t ask for a copy of the videos so they could show them to their buddies for “a laugh” (or sell them online for cash.