Predatory Crimes – A New Holistic Approach

By Superintendent Drew Evans, BCA

So often in our profession we are confronted with new or emerging problems that necessitate the creation of specialized units. This has been the case with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) over the years with our work to protect children from predatory offenders. The BCA created the Predatory Offender Registry to monitor the state’s predatory offenders in the wake of crimes like the Jacob Wetterling abduction. Realizing the value of ensuring we have compliant offenders, the legislature added agent resources to investigate non-compliant offenders, alongside our partners, across the state of Minnesota and required the BCA to investigate every instance when a Level 3 Predatory Offender goes non-compliant.¹

Child pornography has become a significant issue for our communities and the problem has grown year after year. In 2006, the BCA created an Internet Crimes Against Children Unit (ICAC) and became commander of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force for the state of Minnesota in 2010, working with our 100+ affiliate partners to combat these serious crimes of child pornography and online sexual exploitation of our children.

Our last area of focus related to predatory sex crimes is human trafficking, but our involvement was limited to one agent who was dedicated to human trafficking and worked with the various task forces across the state. As we know, this crime has existed for a long time, but we have now realized how serious and pervasive these crimes are once we start looking.

The Need for Change

 The agents we had assigned to these units were dedicated to their work. They worked hard to meet the needs of their cases and their law enforcement partners. However, we had some limitations as well. Our ICAC agents were all stationed in St. Paul creating challenges to best partner with our greater Minnesota agencies. We had only one agent dedicated to human trafficking, whom we needed to re-assign during lean budget times to meet our statutory obligations in our Predatory Offender Investigations Unit. Our ICAC agents worked on child pornography cases all of their time and had to witness increasingly horrific abuse of our children day in and day out. Our predatory crimes agents focused only on registration related offenses, which underutilized these agents. In addition, these units were all relatively small with 4 to 8 agents, meaning we had poor coverage across the state of Minnesota.

A New Approach

With increasing demands for child pornography, human trafficking, and predatory offenders, we requested and received additional resources. However, we decided upon a new approach. We decided to combine these units into one unit that would better serve the needs of our partners, utilize all the talents of our agents, and create a better working environment for the mental health of our agents.

Our goal at the BCA is to be the best possible partner to all our law enforcement partners across the state by meeting their needs. This works best when we are available and located where they work around the state to ensure we have developed relationships and have become someone they know. This new approach allowed us to have agents dedicated to these crimes in Rochester, Mankato, St. Cloud, Hermantown, and Bemidji in addition to St. Paul. They were deployed strategically to the areas of the state where we could best serve our partners.

This new approach has been in place now for a little over a year. We have added new agents all over Minnesota and they are very busy - averaging 4-5 search warrants a week - and are working several large-scale human trafficking cases. They continue to work with our partners to ensure we have high predatory offender compliance rates. They have uncovered numerous predatory offenders re-offending while working on child pornography and human trafficking cases.

This new approach targets all those who prey on our children through predatory crimes while creating better partnerships, better well-being for our agents, and a more holistic approach to predatory crimes.

 1. Minn. Stat. §266.166, Subd. 4(e)(5)