Los Angeles Cops Use the Web to Track Child Predators
High Tech Child Porn & the LAPD Squad Who Tracks It
Child Porn offenders are utilizing high tech tools to lure victims, and LAPD's elite unite is tracking suspects down

They hunt from their computers, their phones, and their gaming devices. They lure via text message, video games, or chat rooms. They are neighbors, teachers, and fathers.

Watch Mekahlo Medina's report about an elite LAPD task force dedicated to finding and arresting child pornographers: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Fastest-Growing-Crime-Against-Ch...

Child porn predators are using high tech tools to lure their victims, and the elite internet crimes against children or ICAC unit at LAPD is on the front-line of the fight to keep kids safe. When LAPD ICAC first formed in Los Angeles in 2004, it was made up of just a few officers and nabbed just one offender. Four years later with a larger staff, committed detectives, and a captain who fights for funding at the helm, ICAC has put nearly 200 suspects in handcuffs for creating or exchanging child porn.

"Some of these kids are being brutally raped, brutally tortured," said Capt. Fabian Lizarraga. "We have some cases involving babies." Lizarraga said detectives work tips they gather from the national cyber tip hotline, and from detective work in chat rooms, message boards, and websites.

Over the past years, Lizarraga said the technology has grown from computers to mobile phones to gaming devices. "The Xbox 360...you can get online and now you can not only battle with someone across the country, you can talk with them and predators know this," said Lizaranga who warned that the "gaming conversations" often lay the ground work for predators to establish a relationship with their victims before they attack.Lizarraga also warns of posting "innocent" pictures on social networking websites. "They will take that picture and remove it and post it to another picture on somebody that's not fully clothed." It's called morphed child porn. It's still a crime. It's still pornography, and detectives will count it among their finds as they mine hard drives, external drives, and thumb drives for evidence of a crime.