For most of his police career, Naperville Detective Mike Sullivan did not own a computer, much less surf the Web. Undercover work meant slouching around town in blue jeans, pretending to be a customer looking for a drug dealer.
These days, Sullivan is more likely to be cruising the Internet undercover, posing as a pre-teen girl wandering into sex-dominated chat rooms or a man in the market for child pornography. For the 42-year- old detective, the ruses are the computer equivalent of stalking criminals incognito, his way of checking out the world he patrols without tipping off the bad guys.
Now Sullivan is helping train other police officers in such high-tech skills as doing undercover work online and searching for evidence on floppy disks and computer hard drives.
“This is all very new for us,” said Sullivan, who recently taught the first two classes on Internet-related crimes ever offered to police officers by a major regional training organization. “If you don’t know about computers, you’re at a disadvantage when this stuff comes up.”
The no-nonsense detective is in the front lines of Chicago-area police officers venturing into the largely unfamiliar territory of crime and the Internet, an area traditionally left to the FBI’s specially trained agents.
As the new world of cybercrime hits close to home, local police department in scattered communities are scrambling to respond, often without adequate equipment or the computer savvy of, say, the average fifth-grader.
In the meantime, they are discovering the myriad ways that Internet users can bedevil local law enforcement.
A Crystal Lake man, for example, took a distinctly modern-day form of revenge on his ex-girlfriend. He posted nude pictures of her along with her name on his personal web page, there for anyone with a computer and Internet access to see. Police used the web address to track the man, who will face a judge next month on misdemeanor charges.
For officers more at home pecking out arrest reports on old-fashioned typewriters, venturing into the computer world of modems and hard drives can be downright intimidating, the deskbound equivalent of chasing a suspect down a dark alley where you can’t be sure of your footing.
“It’s a new frontier,” said Wheeling detective Todd Wolff, who scribbled notes during Sullivan’s class. “We’re just trying to get our feet wet. You have to know how to turn on the computer and what to look for.”
Suburban police report that cybercrimes of all stripes represent only a tiny percentage of the misdemeanors and felonies they confront in their community, if they confront them at all. Still, officers at the class said their interest in the Internet stems from the belief those crimes will become more common in the next few years, when computers will be as standard in American homes as microwave ovens and Internet access will be as easy as calling the cable company.
“Obviously, the World Wide Web is a hot law enforcement topic for the 1990’s,” said Evanston Detective Jeff Jamraz, who has become his department’s unofficial beat cop on the Internet. “I’m just trying to keep up with what’s going on.”
Nationwide, local police departments of all sizes are encountering more crimes where the Internet plays a role, though no exact figures are available, according to Doris Hepler, a special agent for the FBI based in Baltimore. Hepler tracks child pornography cases involving the Internet. The crimes reported to local police run the full spectrum of cases, from pornography and abductions to financial scams, theft and harassment, and are expected to rise as Internet use becomes widespread, Hepler said.
In most cases, “The crimes that are occurring are the traditional ones,” Hepler said. “The Internet and the computer just provide a different means to do it.”
Sullivan may be considered a regional authority on Internet crime, but he goes out of his way not to make veteran detectives feel stupid in this specialized, often foreign, world.
“I’m not going to throw a lot of geek speak at you,” Sullivan reassured last month’s class, given by North East Multi-Regional Training Inc. The non-profit organization offers hundreds of continuing education classes for Chicago-area police officers
Officers from some 16 local police departments, along with a half dozen prosecutors and sheriff’s officers, spent the afternoon in a darkened classroom at the Naperville Police Department’s modern headquarters.
Using a projector that magnified his computer screen, Sullivan took the class, step by step, through the process of logging online. He used a modem to dial his connection to the Internet. Then off he went on the so-called information superhighway, where tens of millions of people worldwide tap into news and specialized information of all sorts, shop electronically and exchange messages.
Deftly pointing and clicking his computer mouse, Sullivan escorted his students on a virtual tour of the shadier corners of the Internet, where pedophiles troll for victims and child pornography is traded.
Scam artists sometimes con unsuspecting computer users out of their credit card numbers or Internet access codes.
“You’re going to find teenagers are the ones doing a lot of this stuff,” Sullivan said of the financial scams. “They’re the ones who know how.”
Sullivan got a laugh of recognition in class when he said he sometimes consults his 14-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son for computer tips. Many cops do the same.
“The real experts in computers are third grade to twelfth grade,” Sullivan said. “They grew up around it. They think that way.”
More and more, Sullivan said, police are dealing with parents who call on them for guidance when they discover their children have visited sexually oriented web sites, or received obscene materials electronically.
“You’re going to get Mom and Dad bringing Junior in, all upset about what Junior got on the computer,” Sullivan told the class of cops.
As demands for this specialized training increase, North East Multi-Regional Training plans to offer additional classes later this year. In April, the training group plans to repeat Sullivan’s class, which focuses on child pornography and the Internet. Also this year, the training group plans to introduce a class to teach police about the search and seizure laws that apply to suspects’ personal computers and electronic files.
The Northwestern University Traffic Institute, another major organization that offers police training in the Chicago area, presently offers a computer crime course that focuses on security issues such as privacy and theft of data, said Broderick Reischl, senior research associate at the institute. A course that specifically addresses Internet crime could be added later, he said.
He said most police do not need to become specialists as long as they understand basic computer and on-line techniques. Knowledgeable officers can learn to retrieve incriminating computer records that suspects think they have purged from their hard drive. Those computer files can be anything from e-mail that proves credit card fraud to digital photographs of child pornography.
Keeping his own careful computer records of typed online exchanges and obscene photographs, Sullivan currently is trying to build cases against three unrelated Naperville area residents, all suspected of trafficking in child pornography.
The Chicago Police Department offers no formal training in the Internet, according to department spokesman Patrick Camden. It routinely refers Internet-related cases to the Federal Bureau of Investigation because most illegal dealings cross state boundaries.
In Will County, Plainfield Detective John Prieboy found himself dealing with his first Internet crime shortly after Sullivan’s class. In that case, a Plainfield homeowner complained to police earlier this month that someone got into his house and ran up charges on his personal computer, using the man’s Internet access service to surf sex sites on the World Wide Web.
Prieboy interviewed several suspects, all teenage computer aficionados. The mystery Internet surfer turned out to be a 14-year-old neighbor who had a key to the house. The teen agreed to reimburse the victim for the illicit surfing and must appear in juvenile court on trespassing charges, Prieboy said.
“I used to come home from school, put on my grubs and go play baseball,” the 37-year-old Prieboy said. “These kids come home, put on their grubs and go play on computers.”
Randy Rajewski of the Mokena Police Department, also in the south suburbs, attended Sullivan’s class to get information for a public service announcement.
The announcement, to be broadcast on a cable community access channel, will tell parents how to make their children safer on the Internet, by supervising the kids’ time online and making sure they know not to give out their telephone number or address.
While many equate Internet crime with the sensational cases involving children lured by online sex predators, such crimes remain relatively rare. Still, a few
disturbing local cases in recent years have parents and law enforcement
officials worried.
Last month, a Philadelphia engineer pleaded guilty to crossing state lines to have sex with a 13-year-old girl in south suburban Matteson, a federal offense. The two met in a chat room and struck up an electronic correspondence that culminated with the illegal encounter in the girl’s hometown. The man is awaiting sentencing.
An abduction case is pending against a Florida man who enticed a 13-year-old Mt. Prospect boy, also an electronic pen pal, to run away with him to Florida.
Sullivan, meanwhile, is fielding calls nearly every day from other officers anxious to get up to speed on the Internet.
“Our job is the protect people,” he said, “and this is part of protecting them.”
