If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. At least that seems to be the policy maxim of Attorney General Buddy Caldwell. In the upcoming regular session, he will once again ask lawmakers to adopt a 10 cent per month fee on Internet users to be deposited in the Internet Crimes Investigation Fund. Chiefly, the fee would be used to beef up Caldwell’s High Tech Crime Unit, which has set regional benchmarks in recent years for chasing down sexual predators. The unit has made a name for itself by training other law enforcement agencies, like the Louisiana State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigations. “I could push one button and institute 4,000 cases on suspected sexual predators,” Caldwell said at the Probation and Parole Conference in Marksville last week. “But I can’t because we just don’t have the manpower. I need more people, I need to stay up with technology or the criminals will have better technology than we do.”
Last year, Caldwell’s Internet fee bill was sponsored by Rep. Bodi White, R-Denham Springs. But there is not yet a similar bill filed on the Legislature’s Web site for the upcoming regular session that convenes in a week. Read the full story here. —Jeremy Alford
