April 6, 2006

By Diane Chiddister

In his first training session last month, Yellow Springs police officer Matt Hoying logged on to a youth-oriented chat room and presented himself as a 14-year-old girl from Yellow Springs. Within minutes Hoying, who was training with the Xenia Police Department’s Internet Child Protection Unit, had his first online encounter with a pedophile — and within hours he had his first arrest.

That afternoon, Saturday, March 25, Dustin Rike, 23, of Powell arrived in town, expecting to have a sexual encounter with a young teenager. Instead, he meet four local policemen.

Rike was arrested for importuning, unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and several drug charges.

Two days later, at 6 a.m. on Monday, Hoying again logged on to several chat rooms posing as a 14-year-old girl. Within two hours, he said, he had been contacted by about 29 older men.

“I am amazed,” Hoying said of the number of older men who are attempting to engage young girls in sexual talk and, possibly, sexual contact on the Internet.

Hoying, who has been with the Yellow Springs Police Department for two years, has been spending an hour or two a day on the computer looking for sexual predators.

Police Chief John Grote said the purpose of the new effort is to communicate to sexual predators that Yellow Springs is not a safe place to abuse young people.

“I would like nothing more than to get out the word that Yellow Springs police are trying to thwart this type of Internet sex crime against children,” Grote said. “I want pedophiles to know that it’s not safe here.”

The Police Department is moving cautiously with the new program, Grote said. It’s not clear exactly how much time Hoying will spend on it, but probably no more than an hour or two a day, when his midnight work shift is slow, the chief said.

“It’s still new,” Grote said. “We’re going slowly, learning our way.”

The department has been interested in pursuing pedophiles online for several years, Grote said. “It’s been on the back burner for a while,” he said.

The department has observed with interest the work of the Xenia Police Department, which has operated the Internet Child Protection Unit for six years, Grote said.

According to Detective Alonzo Wilson, one of four detectives on the Xenia Internet unit, the program has led to about 600 cases in 37 states involving child pornographers and “hundreds of arrests.” The detectives’ work also has led to the arrests of 84 pedophiles who traveled to Xenia for sexual encounters with the alleged children they contacted online, Wilson said.

The program’s purpose is to protect children, Wilson said, and he believes that it has made a difference.

Frequently, he said, when detectives make contact online with men who are seeking sex from teenagers, the men refuse to talk with someone from Xenia because they suspect the person is really a policeman. Wilson said that response is exactly what he wants.

Beyond that, Wilson said, he hopes sexual predators stay away from Ohio altogether.

The Xenia police have been involved in training about 100 Ohio police departments in the Internet protection work, Wilson said.

“I want to make Ohio a hard target for online pedophiles,” he said. “I want them to learn that Ohio is the wrong place to go to meet a child.”

Several years ago Wilson contacted the Yellow Springs Police Department about a possible sexual predator in the area, according to Grote. That information did not turn out to be accurate, Grote said, but the incident influenced the department’s interest in doing Internet work.

Earlier this year, the police were contacted by a 18-year-old girl from Yellow Springs who was upset about being contacted inappropriately while on the Internet, he said.

Throughout this time, Grote said, the Yellow Springs police were hampered by being a small department with more work to do than people to do it. In the past year, the police have added to their already full plates a focus on drug interdiction, in which officers use routine traffic stops to find drugs and arrest drug users.

“We’re a small department with limited resources,” Grote said. “This is another problem that society faces that we’re trying to address in some way.”

The father of a 10-year-old girl, Grote said that he feels strongly about the need for adults to protect the approximately 30 million American children who use the Internet, a feeling, he added, that has only intensified since so many men have contacted Hoying online.

Some of the dialogue the men have used with the person they believe is a 14-year-old girl is “shocking,” Grote said.

“The Internet is so prevalent in children’s lives,” he said. “It has given pedophiles an amazing tool to gain access to them.”

The Police Department began thinking in earnest about pursuing Internet pedophiles after Hoying joined the force two years ago and expressed interest in the work. For the past several months he has observed the Internet units in the Xenia and Fairborn Police Departments. The Yellow Springs police recently purchased a computer dedicated to the project, which only Hoying has access to. Two weekends ago, he began training in Xenia for the Internet work.

Hoying works the midnight to early morning shift, and he conducts Internet investigations when the work on the street is quiet, he said.

He may be moving soon to daytime hours in order to have more access to computer users, he said.

While the department is moving slowly with the Internet child protection work, Grote said he wishes that he had more resources and could move faster.

“We’re talking about people who are trying to entice boys and girls for sex,” he said. “I wish I could devote more time to trying to stop it.”

Contact: dchiddister@ysnews.com