Child protection program affiliated with UNH receives $3.8 million

This new funding comes on the heels of $75 million awarded to ICAC in 2009 (Scroll down to funding). Normally they receive a number in the teens, but for unknown reasons that jumped to 75 million in 2009. Now, more money! I wonder how many of the alleged crimes are actually kids talking to kids. i.e., normal behavior, but now due to technology (The Internet) its online rather than in-person!

9-21-2010 New Hampshire:

A potential child sex offender goes to meet his victim. But instead of a child, or even To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen, they meet police officers educated by the Internet Crimes Against Children’s training program.

The Internet Crimes Against Children task force (ICAC), part of UNH’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, has received a competitive federal grant for $3.8 million from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJPD) in order to continue their research and training efforts against Internet crimes involving minors.

ICAC was started in 1998 by the OJJPD, a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice. Their purpose is to help train law enforcers across the country in how to respond to, catch and prosecute offenders who mainly use the Internet to exploit children by means of trading, transmitting, distributing and manufacturing child pornography and other child exploitation.

Director David Finkelhor, of UNH’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, contacted Bradley Russ, a now-retired Portsmouth police chief and overseer of federal child protection programs under the OJJPD in January 2003 to help create the training program.

Russ and Finkelhor had been colleagues while Russ was in the Portsmouth Police Department. Finkelhor asked him to combine their Internet crimes programs.

“We are able to do a lot of joint projects because they do all of the national research on Internet victimization,” Russ said.

Russ said that out of over 18,000 police departments in the country, 75 percent have 25 or fewer officers. Many of them do not have computer or digital crime officers, which is why the ICAC currently has 61 task forces, with at least one in every state. According to the OJJDP website, since the ICAC started, over 230,000 law enforcers have been trained-not only in the U.S., but in 17 other countries around the world. An ICAC task force has arrested more than 16,500 offenders. (Boiler-plate message to heighten the hysteria)

“We had to submit a proposal, and you score points in different categories depending on how well you do in terms of how you write it out,” Russ said. “And you have to be able to demonstrate that you’ve got the capability and a proven track record to really score well.”

The money will go towards many different aspects of the ICAC training program. One is for the actual training of officers around the country and going to places like schools to teach prevention. Another will be for equipment, such as software capable of searching for potential victims and offenders. The grant will also fund what Russ called “the largest national conference in the world on these topics for the last seven years,” where mass amounts of law enforcers are trained. Last year’s conference in Florida had 180 workshops and classes to train over 1,300 people. ..Source.. by Corinne Holroyd