A province-wide child pornography investigation has led to the arrest of an Estevan resident.
Barry Jefferson, 33, was among eight men arrested following what was described as "an online, pro-active investigation on the Internet into activities pertaining to the possession and distribution of child abuse images in the province of Saskatchewan." The investigation was a joint effort between the Saskatchewan Internet Child Exploitation Unit and the Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
"A lot of stuff we are doing is because (child porn) is getting so prominent out there now that it's more reactive, so we wanted to do a more proactive investigation on these file sharing programs," said Staff Sergeant Ron Weir, the provincial co-ordinator of the ICE unit.
"We have programs where we are able to go in and see who is actively sharing or accessing child pornography within the province. We tried to set off a little bit of time over the last few months to proactively go after some of these offenders."
Jefferson faces charges of accessing child pornography, possession of child pornography and making child pornography available. In all, six of the people arrested in the sweep are facing the same three charges.
"(Jefferson) was accessing it, he was in possession of it and because of the file sharing means to the programs they are using, he was allowing others to access his collections as well and that is where the other charge comes in," Weir said.
Also arrested as a result of the investigation was Mark Nordgulen of Arcola who faces charges of accessing child pornography, possession of child pornography and making child pornography available.
The eight men, who ranged in age from 24 to 56, have all made their first court appearances and were released on a number of conditions. In the press release it was noted that officers did not find any connections between the men arrested and the children depicted in the images.
As has been well documented, child pornography is a growing issue throughout the world and obviously Saskatchewan is not immune. The ICE unit is comprised of officers from the RCMP as well as the Saskatoon, Prince Albert and Regina Police Services who have a mandate to investigate crimes involving the abuse and exploitation of children on the Internet.
"Because of the accessibility that everyone has to the Internet, it's unbelievable as to how much access these people have readily accessible at their fingertips because of the Internet," said Weir who added that the easy availability of child porn has created an incredible amount of work for the officers in the unit.
"Each investigator is going to be carrying eight to 15 investigations at any given time. We are averaging about 200 new investigations every year and we could easily do more if we had the time to do it in a more proactive way but we are just getting overloaded with the work. The more we do it just backlogs on the back end so we can only do so much on the front end while we are analyzing all of the information that we get."
