Justin Cook | The Roanoke Times

During a class at the Christiansburg Police Department earlier this month, Officer Phil Townley of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force teaches officers from other divisions how to hunt down cyber predators.

Christiansburg police Officer Phil Townley is part of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force that is devoted to cases involving child endangerment, including the distribution of child pornography.

CHRISTIANSBURG -- Few people would want to see the images Officer Phil Townley seeks out.

As the Christiansburg Police Department's Internet Crimes Against Children investigator, part of Townley's job is to search the Internet for photographs and videos of children, as young as infants, being sexually abused.

"Regardless of how seasoned you are in law enforcement," he said, "those types of images can invoke a really strong emotional reaction."

That sort of reaction from an officer is how the Christiansburg Police Department ended up becoming the liaison for 10 counties and two cities to the Southern Virginia Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force based in Bedford County, also known as Operation Blue Ridge Thunder.

Bedford County Sheriff Mike Brown has received national attention for his work through Blue Ridge Thunder, created in 1998 to crack down on child pornography distributed over the Internet, solicitation of children online and other computer-related crimes against children.

The program has spread across the state, becoming SOVA ICAC.

In the fall of 2006, an investigator with the Bedford County Sheriff's Office asked Christiansburg police to execute a search warrant at the home of a Christiansburg man whom they suspected of possessing and producing child pornography.

Among the items seized was a video clip of a 3-year-old girl being abused by a grown man, said Maj. Dalton Reid of the Christiansburg police.

The little girl laughed and played, Reid said, with no apparent idea that what was happening to her was wrong.

"It was disturbing, very disturbing," he said.

For days, he said he worried about that little girl and all the other children who were being similarly abused. So he pushed for the Christiansburg department to take a lead role in helping to find the people who abuse children either directly or by sharing and downloading child pornography.

About the same time, the leaders of SOVA ICAC were trying to get more agencies involved in their investigations.

"We could not manage the entire state" because of the number of cases, Bedford County sheriff's Lt. Mike Harmony said.

By splitting the southern part of the state -- everywhere except the Northern Virginia area -- into seven districts and finding a police agency that could coordinate each district, more cases could be investigated, Harmony said. Because cases would be investigated locally, they could move more quickly, he added.

In October, Christiansburg police agreed to head District 5, an area that stretches from Craig County to Grayson County.

In its role, the department disperses funding to other agencies in the district, offers them training opportunities and sends cases to them. Lt. Derek Altizer, Townley's supervisor, receives a monthly report from each agency involved in ICAC investigations that describes its work in training, presentations and investigations.

Funding for SOVA ICAC needs -- computers, software, training -- comes from grant money from the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

The Christiansburg department received a check for $19,000 of that grant money last year from the Bedford County Sheriff's Office to devote to ICAC needs across District 5.

The Christiansburg department has investigated ICAC cases since taking the role as the District 5 coordinator, though not as regularly as it does now. It gained a full-time investigator July 1, when Townley moved from patrol to investigations after his ICAC training was complete and the town agreed to devote an officer to investigate ICAC and Department of Social Services cases.

In addition to searching for people who share child pornography, part of Townley's job is to help educate the public on Internet safety. He has scheduled presentations with teachers, church groups and other agencies to discuss the possible dangers of the Internet, and is eager for more to contact him.

"Educating people to not get hung up in this kind of stuff is just as important, if not more important" than investigating crimes that already are taking place, Altizer said.

The Christiansburg Police Department is also looking into other ways to find offenders. One possibility is to have an officer pose online as a child and wait to be solicited. Harmony said that as he pretended to be a juvenile in a chat room one night, "more than 50 people solicited me for sex."

Child pornography "is not a victimless crime just because it's a picture," Reid said. "Behind every one of those pictures and movies is a child who is never going to be the same because of what is being done to them."

Since he took over the job as an ICAC investigator, Townley has helped launch 41 child pornography investigations throughout the state. No charges have been filed yet against anyone in Christiansburg.

To find people who are sharing pornographic images of children online, officers search fileshare networks -- the peer-to-peer networks most commonly used to share music -- for a code that is embedded in the images and cannot be altered.

After they find what they are looking for, it takes officers only a matter of seconds to determine what computer the files are stored on and where that computer is located.

If it is at an address within an officer's jurisdiction, he or she can get a search warrant. If it's not, the address is logged into a database to make the search easier for officers from other police departments.

Townley won't talk about any specific case, noting that it can take as long as several months after someone's home is searched before a person might be charged with a crime such as distributing child pornography.

First, computers and other items that are seized must be sent to a Virginia State Police lab to be analyzed.

For the cases to hold up in court, computers' contents have to be searched by someone who is trained to do so properly.

The Blacksburg Police Department is also actively investigating ICAC cases and has two officers who are trained to investigate them. In the two months those officers have been working on cases, they have made two arrests, one each on a charge of possession of child pornography and of child enticement, Sgt. Nathan O'Dell said.

Townley said he looks at child pornography the same way he might look at the body of someone who has been slain. It is not something he wants to see, he said, but the more objective and less emotional he is, the better an investigator he will be.

Also, he said, he thinks having two children, a son and daughter, makes him more passionate about his work.

"I think it gives me more of a drive to want to pursue these cases," he said.

"All the crimes we investigate are important," Altizer said. "To me ... you can't get more satisfaction than when you put somebody like that, somebody who would abuse children, behind bars."

Anyone interested in hosting a presentation on Internet safety should call Townley at 382-6123 or e-mail ptownley@christiansburg.org.