Atlanta Wal-Mart Helps the Fight Against Child Exploitation

Child exploitation, primarily online solicitation of a child or child pornography offenses, are on the rise across the nation. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) the number of child pornography cases reported through them from January 1 through June 30 was 12,052,816 in 2020 compared to 6,328,910 within the same time frame of 2019. The same can be said for their reported numbers of Online Enticement cases with that number being 13,268 from January 1 through June 30, 2020 compared to 6,863 within the same time frame of 2019. The Cass County Criminal District Attorney’s Office hosts the areas only State digital forensics laboratory and is directly impacted by the increase in these crimes. The CCDA digital forensics lab not only serves Cass County, but also the surrounding counties of Bowie, Marion, Morris, Harrison, and others.

“One of the more challenging parts of these types of investigations is getting the forensics done not only correctly, but quickly.” says Cody Sartor who operates the lab. “The need to get these perpetrators off of the street and into the courtroom is pressing and important. But what many people don’t know is that for every device examined, I have to view each and every piece of media, video or image, contained on the device. In addition to viewing and flagging illegal items, each illegal item has to be broken down into different categories, depending on what the image or video depicts. This process can be extremely tedious and time consuming.” Sartor goes on to explain that there was in excess of one million pieces of media on a recent cell phone he was tasked to process and that computers have even more in their data store. “The processing of images is fairly straight forward, you lay the images out across your screens and begin to categorize them. I have been using two 27-inch monitors that were capable of displaying a maximum of 350 images across both screens when viewed at their smallest size. As you can imagine, it takes some time to go through all of the images 350 at a time. My processing time has been directly affected by the size of my monitors,” said Sartor. “One day I was at our local Wal-Mart speaking to John Kelly, a manager there, about the problem I was experiencing. Together we began to talk about using televisions as monitors. A short time later, John called me and said that the store was going to donate two televisions to help the lab. After installing these televisions as monitors, I can now fit just over 1500 images across the screens at one time.”

Criminal District Attorney Courtney Shelton said “We are extremely grateful to Wal-Mart for the donations of these televisions. The CCDA digital forensics lab was originally funded by outside sources. The training and equipment, which totals around $80,000 combined, was provided to our office by the United States Secret Service at no cost to the county to help combat ongoing cybercrime.” DA Shelton stated that her office “does have to pay for software license renewals and storage media out of our budget, which is approximately $8000 annually. Because we believe in this mission, and understand the constraints that small law enforcement agencies bear, we have not sought to recoup any fees for our services. From what I understand, this donation will allow Investigator Sartor to speed up his processing time, allowing him to process more devices in a shorter time period.”