Person of the Week: Paul Gillespie

March 17, 2006 — -- Detective Sgt. Paul Gillespie says that savvy Internet criminals are almost impossible to catch.

"Law enforcement is really behind the eight ball," says Gillespie, the director of the Sex Crimes Unit for Toronto's Police Service. His unit is at the forefront of tracking Internet sex offenders.

Years of hard work finally came to fruition this week for the unit, with the arrests of 27 people -- from Canada, the United States, Britain and Australia. They were charged with taking part in an international child pornography ring on the Internet.

"We were able to have some of our undercover officers get into that area of the Internet posing as like-minded criminals and gain confidence of the group to the point where we were able to gathering intelligence and ultimately identify these offenders around the world," Gillespie said.

The evidence against the suspects is said to be horrific. The child porn ring included live, streaming video of some of the suspects performing sex acts on children, said officials.

Police say seven children -- the youngest just 18 months old -- were used in the videos.

"It causes you to shake your head, once you see the levels of depravity -- the concept of live, streaming video, abuse on demand, horrific images of all these very young children, scarring them for life," Gillespie said. "A child who is victimized in this way, their spirit is broken and they never, ever are totally cured."

The job can be difficult and frustrating, he says. Police around the world often don't share information, and in an increasingly global world, Gillespie knew the only way to solve the big cases would be with a global database. So he took a chance and approached Microsoft's Bill Gates.

"We had a series of meetings and what we came up with was the concept of the exploitation tracking system, [with the] ability for law enforcement in Canada and around the world to work together and store all of our information in this incredibly powerful database," he said.