LIGHT FROM DARKNESS FULL FEATURE
There’s a challenging contrast in Det. Sgt. Jeremy Spence’s office.
Behind him are pictures of his family, including his four children, of exactly what you would expect: images of posed smiles and hugs in laughter.
That innocence diverges from the images and videos on his computer, some that even after nearly 14 years in the Ontario Provincial Police’s Child Exploitation Unit, leaves the senior officer speechless.
“I’m not going to lie, there’s some movies out there that make me sick to my stomach to this day and I don’t even want to think about them right now,” he said. “Because it bothers me that people can be so cruel to children.”
But such is the work of Spence and his 16 colleagues in the unit, tasked with the painstaking and sometimes unsurprisingly draining duty of going through all images and videos in child porn investigations.
One of those was a precedent-setting case called Project Greenwell/Blackheath, which in June led to the shutdown of a website that was uploading child porn content, attracting 60,000 users from 116 countries.
After seven years of work between various Canadian and U.S. agencies, not only were five GTA men charged, but it was the first time that web hosts were charged as party to the offenses of possessing and making such content available.
And of the nearly 360,000 child porn images that were uploaded to the site, it was Spence who went through every one of them.
Because the case is still before the courts, he can’t talk about its specifics, but the investigation offers a glimpse into the workload Spence and his fellow colleagues have.
And amazingly, 360,000 doesn’t come close to his largest files.
“I have had multiple cases where I've had to categorize over 3, 4, 5 million images and movies,” he said. “But that's not uncommon now unfortunately with the devices that people have and the amount of storage, when we're talking about 10 terabytes of information.”
It’s a job that notwithstanding the obvious logistical challenge, presents the glaringly mental and emotional one: how do you look at some of the worst content imaginable on a daily basis?
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It’s a question Spence wondered himself at the end of 2005, when he was looking for a new challenge in his policing career, which began in 1989. After working in a number of departments and forces, a colleague suggested he consider what was then-called the Child Pornography Section of the OPP.
Naturally he was hesitant given the subject matter, but decided to apply when a position opened up.
He started in January 2006 and quickly discovered there was no way to prepare for what he would see.
“I’m like oh my god, that looks like my kid,” he said reflecting on his early time in the unit, as a father of four children, including three girls, his youngest being two around the time he started. “I was sick to my stomach and I didn’t know if I could do it.”
Thankfully, a turning point wasn’t far. He made his first couple of arrests and then a few investigations in, achieved what he would discover to be most meaningful factor of his new role: saving his first two children, who were around the ages of six to eight.
“I’m like wow, that’s the satisfaction of this job, I stopped and was able to identify these two young children,” he said.
In recent years, the OPP has identified 282 child victims between 2013 and October of this year, including 53 in 2019 as of the end of October.
And every once in a while, a rescue comes full circle. As recently, a former victim called the office on her wedding day to thank the investigator that rescued her roughly a decade before.
“I'm always fascinated by human resilience and the ability for human beings to survive things, so it's very rewarding,” unit manager and Det. Sgt. Sharon Hanlon said of the phone call to an investigator. “It helps you remember that this is worth it.”
Hanlon spent three and a half years as an investigator before working in several other units, but eventually returned to the department in her current role in 2016.
During her first stint, she says Spence took her under his wing.
“A lot of people have the title leader, Jeremy wears it on his chest,” she said. “He's always there, he knows what to expect. He's there as an informal mentor to everybody and makes sure they're walking down the right path and taking care of their own wellness.”
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The issue of wellness is a critical one for Hanlon, who oversees the office and points out that each member deals with the mental and emotional toll of the content they see differently.
There are various resources for officers including the SafeGuard program, which involves a mandatory meeting with a psychologist at least once a year.
But the biggest support both Hanlon and Spence say is the camaraderie of those within the group, as few can truly understand the burden of their work like their own.
Management of mental health in the OPP overall has come under scrutiny this decade, highlighted by the Ontario Ombudsman’s 2012 report that the force wasn’t doing enough to manage post-traumatic stress disorder amongst its members.
In reviewing the number of officer suicides at the time, the report criticized a “suck it up” culture in the force, where the stigma around mental health was described by one officer as the ‘elephant in the room.’
Ironically, Hanlon uses the same expression when discussing the reality of her unit, but with a vastly different conclusion.
“The elephant in the room is the ‘I’m Super Cop, this doesn’t bother me,’” she said. “There’s only one person it doesn’t bother and that’s the people that are interested in sexually abusing children.”
“It should have an impact on you and that’s okay.”
On top of Spence’s own investigative work, he also teaches at the Canadian Police College as an expert in the field and looks after his unit’s Victim Identification Team.
He echoes Hanlon’s message of an open-door policy, while emphasizing peer support can’t be understated.
“When some of my officers that I look after, if they say ‘hey, I’ve been looking at this for the last couple of hours, I need a break,’ okay go, take a break,” he said. “The bottom line is the camaraderie that we have with our group, with our team that kind of keeps you sane sometimes.”
But taking a break is sometimes not even about a temporary mental reprieve, but allowing yourself to have a life outside of work. Despite her metaphor of putting “bubble wrap around your brain” to diligently get through sorting out thousands of disturbing images and videos, it’s difficult to not get attached. She said you sometimes can’t help but look at the eyes of the children looking into a camera, unable to pick up the phone for help.
“It’s hard every day to turn your computer off because you feel like you're turning your back on that child,” Hanlon said. “You feel a little guilty, because the faces are looking back at you.”
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Aside from the obvious mental struggle of looking at the content is the logistical one of actually categorizing it.
When Spence began his career, images would be separated into six sections: child porn, nudity, files of interest, adult porn, obscenity and anything that didn’t fit into the first five. But as investigators deal with extraordinarily massive and complex investigations, such as Blackheath, the unit has since switched to the three categories of porn, nudity/files of interest and anything that doesn’t apply to the first two.
Along with methods of categorization evolving, so too has the software. Spence showed NEWSTALK1010 how the program Semantics21 works. A series of images from a computer are displayed on a screen and an investigator can quickly click on each one with the respective category number (1, 2 or 3) and then the next set of images automatically pops up (NOTE: Only non-graphic Category 3 images were shown.)
There are also various tools and filters in the programming to go through massive amounts of data quicker. Sometimes previous officers have already categorized images before it reaches the desk of a unit officer. Certain filters also exist to isolate out banners, icons and other pictures that have also been saved by a computer.
Spence gives an example of technically having to categorize a million images, but because of pre-categorization and the filtering out of non-graphic images, he may only have to really work on a quarter of them.
“If we can filter those, or eliminate them from the category, then all of a sudden we've knocked down the number again and then, we just go from there,” he said.
Despite the technological advancements and expertise, categorizing multi-million-image and movie totals can take up to six to eight months. And then there’s the process of sifting through images to try and find clues of where certain victims may be located.
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The work isn’t lost on other officers either.
“We go around to different detachments and we’re executing our search warrant and they say you know, thanks for the work you do because I couldn’t do it,” he said, often returning the compliment by thanking them for the work they do, such as responding to fatal car crashes, which he struggled with earlier in this career.
The mental tug-of-war of his current post affected him more so in his early days in the unit, such as when his girls were in figure skating and dance.
He’d think to himself: are there children in this arena being sexually abused right now that I can’t help?
He recalls once being at a dinner party with other parents and when asked about what he did for work, he admittedly “spoiled the party.”
“I’m very passionate about my job and I started talking about some of the horror stories,” he remembers. “The people got long faces, they were sad, they left and I actually had to apologize the next day.”
While he’s refined how he talks about his job, he stresses the people that view, create and share child porn is more far-reaching than you may think. It’s not just the creepy man in a van on the street or the one sitting alone in his basement. It’s husbands with families. It’s every profession. Which Spence is sad to report has included those in policing, adding an additional level of tribulation.
But Spence’s focus over the years has evolved to talking about the successes of the job, rather than the obvious stresses.
He discusses the wins of an undercover cop making an arrest, the experience of working with different agencies across the province and internationally, traveling throughout Ontario and of course, the irreplaceable triumph of rescuing a child. Now nearing his retirement, it’s those positives that he promotes when encouraging other officers to consider taking on work in the unit.
Which is no easy task.
“Recruiting somebody to get into this unit is a challenge in and of itself,” Hanlon says, from getting them in the door to what happens during the interview process. For full transparency of what the job entails, potential members are shown content to give them an idea of what they would be dealing with.
“Not everybody can do this and people have to find their niche and so I make the assumption that when you say you want to come into Child Sexual Exploitation, you have some experience in sexual abuse because that’s what it is,” she said.
But Spence’s message to officers who were in the same position he was in 14 years ago is to stay open-minded.
“I really advocate for our unit to say, people, give it a try, you will be happy,” he said. “There's been certain jobs I've done, I'm not going to lie in the policing field and I'm like god, I don't want to do this anymore. I can't do this, it's driving me crazy, I'm getting tired of the shift work or I’m' getting tired of this.”
“In almost 14 years, I have never said that once.”
To learn about the signs of child exploitation and more regarding the issue, read more at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection at www.protectchildren.ca