Crime
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) — About 30 investigators recently huddled behind computers, logged into social media apps, posing as children and talking to strangers.
Those strangers are around the Dallas-Fort Worth area. One as far as Cleburne. Another from Arlington.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports they think they’re talking to a 15-year-old girl. Or a 13-year-old boy.
It was a Thursday afternoon, the first day of the Fort Worth Police Department’s two-day online solicitation sting. They’re looking for child predators — men and women who seek out minors for sex.
The department allowed a reporter and videographer from the Star-Telegram to sit in on the sting to see what goes into the online solicitation operation, as long as certain details weren’t published to protect the integrity of future stings.
Sgt. Rachel DeHoyos supervises the operation. She sits in the center of the command room. She uses a spreadsheet to keep up with the names, screen names, locations and descriptions of the “bad guys.”
Similar operations are conducted about three times a year. DeHoyos wishes she had more investigators on her team because the stream of online predators seems never-ending, she said.
In front of her, a large projector displays live video of the two “take-down” locations, where the predators will eventually go, thinking they’re meeting up with children. Instead, an arrest team awaits, hiding so as not to spook the predators.
One detective, Domingo Martinez, has at least three conversations happening at once. He’s pretending to be a 13-year-old girl. After six years on the job, he has figured out how to successfully be a teenager.
They always give the men a chance to leave the conversation, but most don’t. The detectives never make the first contact. It keeps the investigators from crossing into the territory of entrapment, and they work with the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Martinez has mugshots of the men and women he’s arrested hanging on a “Wall of Shame” in his office. There are at least 50 of them.
Sometimes, they’ll catch the same man more than once.
Detectives from Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the Texas Department of Safety and the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office are also involved in the operation.
“It takes a lot of work,” DeHoyos said. “My guys do incredible work. But nobody wants to hear about the kids who have been victimized. No one wants to hear that this is actually happening.”