Literally every other week, on average, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry’s office issues a press release announcing the arrest of someone, or several people, on charges of child pornography, writes Business Report Editor Stephanie Riegel in her latest column.
“No question, the ambitious AG is well-versed in the art of self promotion, and it clearly behooves his political interests to make the public aware of the work his office is doing to crack down on some of the most reprehensible criminals in our midst,” Riegel writes. “But it’s important to give credit where credit is due, and the people in Landry’s office are truly fighting the good fight on the front lines of a battle that is growing bigger by the day—and becoming ever harder to win.”
Few people outside of law enforcement circles and special interest groups that advocate for exploited children seem to know very much about the issue of child pornography or care about the extent to which it is a problem, she writes.
Incidents of child porn over the past decade have increased more than 1,000%, Riegel says citing national estimates. And in 2015 alone, analysts at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reviewed 26 million child sex abuse images, according to an FBI report published the following year. That same report analyzed one particularly egregious site on the dark web and found 100,000 users had accessed it in just a single, 12-day period.
“Closer to home, the numbers are less staggering but no less alarming,” Riegel writes. “Since Landry took office in January 2016, more than 212 perpetrators have been arrested in the state on more than 10,000 counts of child pornography. In the past six weeks alone, Landry’s office has made six separate arrests of 13 men (they’re almost always men) on more than 1,000 counts on child porn, including production, distribution and possession.”
Riegel recently sat down with Landry and the two top investigators in his office who deal with cybercrimes—Brian Brown, supervisory special agent for the AG’s cybercrime unit, and Corey Bourgeois, who heads the Louisiana unit of Internet Crimes Against Children, a multistate task force that includes more than 3,500 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies nationwide.
Bourgeois and Brown, Riegel notes, have been on the job for more than a decade, and over that time they’ve seen some troubling trends—like the sheer increase in the amount of child porn out there.
The nascent industry exploded overnight with the advent of the internet in the early 1990s, she writes. The problem of child porn has gotten worse with the proliferation of the smartphone over the past decade.
“Today, the vilest of content is available to anyone with the click of a button, and Brown and Bourgeois have made arrests in this state that span the socioeconomic spectrum—college students, police officers, firefighters, teachers, attorneys, doctors and construction workers, to name a few,” Riegel says.
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