Brooklyn Park police get funds to speed up child exploitation cases
The Brooklyn Park Police Department (BPPD) was granted nearly $10,000 for technology to help process child exploitation and child sex trafficking evidence faster.
BPPD received an $8,974.52 grant from Our Rescue, a non-profit organization whose mission is to end child exploitation and sex trafficking across the U.S. On Monday, the Brooklyn Park City Council voted to approve a $1,000 match.
“It’s going to help us build out a high power forensic machine that can actually intake image and process all the data from the suspect offenders, and leverage that with a software that utilizes AI technology to actually identify some of these child sex abuse material, images and videos, it will be able to quickly identify them, tell them where in the computer they were found, and then also it will package that up nicely into a prosecutable kind of case file for the attorneys to present in court as well,” said Sergeant Jake Tuzinski, with the juvenile unit.
“There is no doubt that crimes of exploitation against children are on the rise,” said William Walker, Senior Vice President for law enforcement operations and enterprise at Our Rescue. “It’s a horrific and heinous crime, we see child victims in the months old, unfortunately, and all the way up to and through early adulthood.”
“Right now, being a mid-sized agency within the state, we’re really limited in some capabilities, especially as it comes to computers,” Sgt. Tuzinski said. “We have to kind of outsource all of our computers and other drives to a state or federal partner who are great partners in doing that and helping us. It’s just that they also get leveraged by several other departments.”
He said that with the new technology, they can handle everything in their own building.
“So sometimes the turnaround can be time, can be months and even up to a year sometimes. With this, having an in-house, we can turn months and years into days or a week,” Tuzinski said.
The Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) data shows there are more than 200 Minnesota children who were victims of sexual assault or exploitation this year.
“In some cases, we’ve seen they’re actually taking kids’ faces and then having AI generate a nude body,” Tuzinski said.
In August, Brooklyn Park school counselor Jason Polzin was charged after allegedly filming a student at school and photoshopping the images into child sexual abuse material.
Tuzinski said that was a case that took about a year to get prosecuted because of the outsourcing process.
“This was a person who was a counselor at a school in our community, who still had access to students, you know, during that time. So when we talk about really shrinking that gap, we’re not just restoring justice for that one victim, but we’re also preventing several other victims that we may never even know about now, which is great,” he said.
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