Inside the Police operation tracking the abductors of Madeleine McCann

Heartbreakers

Madeleine McCann in happier days.

By Julian Sher

It is hard to find any good news in the nightmare that has gripped the McCann family – and much of the British public’s imagination – with the disappearance of their three year old daughter, Madeleine, in Portugal.

But if there is a glimmer of hope in this story, it is this: never before have the police in the UK and around the world been as prepared and coordinated in their hunt for child predators. It's a far cry from the situation surrounding the abduction of the child Ben Needham in Greece in 1991.

It was just last spring, one year before Madeleine’s abduction, that the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) was formally set up – bringing together under a single roof not just police but also psychological profilers, educators and financial investigators in perhaps the world’s most ambitious project to fight child predators.

“This is about us using technology to make the world smaller,” CEOP’s founder and director Jim Gamble once told me. “You will be caught,” he warns predators. “There is no place to hide.”

Gamble brought the same zeal he deployed as a gruff police commander on the streets of Belfast during ‘The Troubles’ to the hunt for worldwide predators.

When news of Madeleine’s abduction broke, CEOP immediately made two of its top behaviourial analysts available to the Portuguese investigators, including forensic psychologist Joe Sullivan, one of the world’s leading experts on child predators. I have seen Sullivan mesmerize an international conference of hundreds of investigators with his insights into what makes child sex offenders tick.

“We don’t have the luxury of allowing ourselves to see them as monsters,” Sullivan says. “That may be a comfortable place to be, but it’s dangerous. Seeing someone as a monster dehumanizes him, makes him so different from us that we cannot really begin to understand him.”

And you can’t catch what you can’t understand.

British police have also supplied the Portuguese authorities with a list of men on the sex offenders register who have traveled to the area where Madeleine disappeared. Knowing the movements of known predators has been a top priority for CEOP’s intelligence force. “If you’re a pedophile, I want to know everything about you,” Gamble says. “We’re going to be all over you like a cheap suit.”

According to press reports, Madeleine’s parents spent several hours looking at hundreds of photographs of known paedophiles.

Should pictures of Madeleine turn up anywhere on the Internet, the police are also better equipped to find her.

CEOP’s crack image analysis team uses Childbase, sophisticated facial recognition software. Started with about 280,000 images in 2003, it has grown substantially since and is robust enough that it can cope with slight changes in someone’s appearance, such as hats and glasses or other disguises.

The cooperation between the British and Portuguese authorities “to ensure” as CEOP puts it, “the full range of expertise available for every possible avenue of investigation” is also typical of a new era of international sharing between police hunting the predators.

For crime without borders, think of it as Police Without Borders. CEOP’s London operations also houses the headquarters for the Virtual Global Taskforce, which aims to bring a 24/7 police presence to the Web and coordinate

Police in the UK and a half dozen other countries have also begun to deploy the Child Exploitation Tracking System (CETS), a vast database of police intelligence on victims and predators developed by Microsoft after a Canadian police officer sent an anguished email to Bill Gates several years ago pleading for help.

The richest man in the world answered that email and Microsoft -- working with police forces around the world -- invested several million dollars to build a powerful tool that can analyze and make connections between seemingly disparate pieces of clues and evidence.

To share confidential files, pictures and sensitive data and leads, police also use a super-encrypted file sharing and communication tool known as Groove so that no matter where they are in the world, they can work on – and hopefully solve -- the same cases.

And there have been some remarkable successes.

Back in 2003, when Canadian, UK and American police scrambled to find a girl whose pictures of abuse inside a cage had flooded the internet, they were able to locate and rescue her in North Carolina within 33 hours.

Last year, when a Canadian police officer passed on information to CEOP about a UK man who was filming the rape of a 12 year old girl, the culprit was arrested in London within 24 hours and the girl was saved. That investigation eventually led to the bust of an international ring of online predators, with more than 64 arrests and 43 children rescued around the world.

CEOP’s slogan is: “Making Every Child Matter – Everywhere.”

And they mean it. For all the Madeleine’s out there.
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Julian Sher is the author of the just-released One Child at a Time: Inside the Fight to Rescue Children from Online Predators (Vision Paperbacks, £10.99)

http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/toddler-ben-needham-disappeared-over-15-years-ago-and-mum-kerry-still-preys-for-his-re.html

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