A police unit in Greater Victoria dedicated to combating online child sexual exploitation is being re-established as cases continue to rise, says the Ministry of Public Safety.
On Saturday, the Ministry of Public Safety announced that the Capital Regional District Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) unit would be re-established for three years as part of a $3.5-million effort to empower municipal police departments to fight online child sexual exploitation.
Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General Mike Farnworth said online child exploitation is a daily occurrence and B.C. must be prepared to protect children from harm as social media platforms continue to grow.
“Children and youth are spending more time online than ever. Sadly, that increases their vulnerability to predators looking to take advantage of them,” he said in a statement.
Police departments in Victoria, Esquimalt, Saanich, Central Saanich and Oak Bay came together to form an integrated unit for internet child-exploitation cases in 2021. The six-month pilot project, which looked to integrate existing departmental resources of the five police agencies, was shelved in March 2022.
Central Saanich police Deputy Chief Kevin Hackett said the re-established CRD ICE unit will continue its collaborative, integrated, and coordinated approach that it had taken during its pilot period. “We are confident that this new funding will help us to further build on those successes,” he said in a statement.
Darren Laur, a retired Victoria police officer who is now an online investigator, said he has long advocated for a dedicated ICE unit in Greater Victoria.
“It went over very, very well but they had to disband it because of the lack of funding,” he said of the pilot project. “It’s really nice to see now that the funding is back in place to get this unit up and going, because its something that is needed in every jurisdiction across our country.”
Laur, whose company teaches digital literacy through businesses, organizations and schools, said many of these investigations rely on building relationships with partner agencies across the world due to the often cross-border nature of online child sexual exploitation.
“A search warrant that is issued by a Canadian court has no jurisprudence in places like England.”
While many municipal police departments have at least one officer who is trained to conduct internet child-exploitation cases, bringing together officers into one unit is “extremely advantageous,” he said.
The CRD unit will consist of a sergeant, four constables, and a clerk and will be the same size as the ICE unit in the Vancouver Police Department.
It would be the third region-specific ICE unit in the province, in addition to existing units in Vancouver and Kelowna.
Funding for the unit is coming from Public Safety Canada as part of efforts to combat serious and organized crime.
A province-wide RCMP unit brings the total amount of people working on police units dedicated to internet child-exploitation cases in the province to 28.
Laur said that’s still not enough police resources to deal with online child sexual exploitation.
“You could probably triple the budget and still not have enough investigators to deal with the influx of these types of cases.”
Referrals to B.C. RCMP’s Integrated Child Exploitation unit from other law enforcement agencies have gone up since 2020.
From 2021 to 2022, reports grew to 9,600 from 4,600.
In October, a 37- year-old Oregon man was sentenced to 20 years in prison for using social media to stalk and sexually exploit three B.C. teenage girls, coercing them into sending explicit images and then using those images to threaten them between 2020 and 2021.
The three youths, ages 14 and 15 at the time, lived in the West Shore, Comox Valley and Surrey.
