Canada's police are having difficulty pace with pedophiles who prey on their young victims through the Internet, because lawmakers and the courts fail to appreciate the extent and the seriousness of the problem, says Toronto police chief Julian Fantino.
"This is a global issue, [in which] Canada is lagging behind and we don't have the technical expertise, the backing of the justice system or the financial resources to investigate it," Fantino told the Calgary Sun. The whole issue of pornography and protecting children from sexual predators "is underappreciated by the legal system . . . which [hands out] insignificant sentencing," he added.
Fantino was in Calgary to speak at Crimestrike Four, an event hosted by local Canadian Alliance MP Art Hanger. "We want to push the federal government to make tougher laws against pedophiles," said Hanger. "The federal government has not kept pace with the offenders and has failed to regulate service providers."
"We can't keep up with the workload at all," agrees Superintendent Peter Macaulay, who heads the RCMP's technological crime branch. "[Internet-related crime] is a growth industry, right across the board. . . . It's exponential," he told the Vancouver Sun. The Ottawa-based unit investigates primarily pornography, crimes against children, national security and fraud. But despite a quadrupling of his staff just in the past two years to more than 150 officers and civilian experts, Macaulay admits even that is that what is needed to combat the growth and the increasing complexity of cybercrime.
One of the unit's biggest challenges, says Macaulay, is the time it now takes to search a suspected offender's computers for evidence. "Five years ago, people would be sitting there with a 40-megabyte hard drive. Now we're looking at 100 gigabytes as the norm - all of which has to be analysed."
