A federal grant is set to help the Vancouver Police Department hunt down child sexual predators.
The $493,000 Office of Community Policing Services, or COPS, grant will reimburse the department for the entry-level salary and benefits costs for one officer and one civilian computer forensic investigator for two years, Police Chief Cliff Cook said Monday, shortly before the city council agreed to accept the funding.
The officer and the computer investigator will work with the department’s sex offender monitoring, career criminal apprehension, digital evidence and child and sexual exploitation units to stop online predators and investigate sex trafficking, he said.
“The positions are going to help us take a hard look at a problem that we have only been able to make infrequent attempts at solving,” Cook said.
The acceptance of the grant is particularly timely, with the spotlight recently being cast upon the Portland metro area and the Interstate 5 corridor as a hotbed of child prostitution rings and sexual trafficking. Early this month, the FBI arrested 14 people and rescued two underage girls in Clark County as part of a nationwide sting to crack down on sex trafficking.
Cook said it was just another example of crimes that many don’t believe happen in the city. In the FBI sting, several of the appointments for prostitution were at Vancouver motels.
The child sexual predator positions will “more than likely” patrol the Internet, posing as an underage boy or girl to help apprehend criminals, Cook said.
The team can also use the Web to help make a criminal case against a suspect, he said.
The two-position COPS grant comes on the heels of another $2.58 million COPS grant that the city council accepted in August. The grant, made through the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, is paying entry-level salaries and benefits for 10 officers that would have otherwise been laid off in city budget cuts. The city must cover the salary difference and step increases; the grant also requires that the city pay for all those positions for a third year, or return the full grant to the federal government.
The sexual predator COPS grant does not require the city cover those jobs after the grant expires, but just that the city make a “strong effort” to keep the jobs, Cook said.
Andrea Damewood: 360-735-4542 or andrea.damewood@columbian.com.
