Detective Thomas Gladney’s proclivity for computers helped him rise through the Michigan State Police ranks rather quickly.
“Like a lot of people my age, I got into computer games when I was younger. Law enforcement officers and computers don’t get along very often. So, it was an attractive transition for me,” he said.
Three years into his career, in 2019, he was promoted to its Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. Since then, Gladney, 30, based in Dimondale, has led one of several regional Michigan efforts to investigate adults targeting children and youth online.
In 2023, Michigan task force investigators arrested 108 statewide and 35 in Greater Lansing. Those numbers have risen to 116 and 31, respectively, this year. Gladney said the phenomenon only seems to be growing.
“Unfortunately, during COVID, we saw an explosion of the amount of work that we have. There’s a line from pre- to post-pandemic where people were shut up at home and more chronically online than they were before, and we saw that reflected in the number of incidents,” he said.
In Greater Lansing, the spike is visible in several recent arrests of high-profile individuals.
The most prominent was Delta Township Supervisor Ken Fletcher, 58, caught by the task force in an August sting operation after authorities said he used an LGBTQ+ dating app to contact and organize a meet-up with an undercover officer posing as a 15-year-old boy. Fletcher resigned after he was arrested.
Former Waverly Community Schools teacher Robert Herzing, 32, was arrested by Eaton County sheriff’s officers in September under nearly identical circumstances.
In May, former Holt High School boys basketball coach Muhammad El-Amin, 36, allegedly responded to a police post on a prostitution website and agreed to meet up for “oral sex” with an agent he believed to be a 15 year-old girl. He was arrested by Lansing Police at a local Quality Dairy.
In July, former teacher at Lansing Community College Joseph Tenbrink, 42, was arrested for allegedly meeting another decoy disguised as a 15-year-old girl. Police said he engaged in sexual conversations with them on the anonymous social media app, Whisper, and was busted in a joint operation with the LPD and Eaton County.
The four have pleaded not guilty.
All four were hit with the primary charge of accosting a minor for immoral purposes. In Michigan, this is defined as “a person who accosts, entices, or solicits a child less than 16 years of age, regardless of whether the person knows the actual age of the child.” It carries a maximum felony punishment of four years’ imprisonment, a fine of up to $4,000, or both.
Because those cases are all ongoing, Gladney couldn’t comment on his team’s role in them. “It’s one of those things where anonymity is key to our success in those investigations,” he said.
He did, however, comment on the nature of sting operations as a whole.
“I can’t get too far off into the weeds, but what I can say is that we start to conduct these investigations when we identify that there is attempted human trafficking of juveniles on these platforms. We’re trying to be proactive to try to stop these offenders before they have actual live victims,” Gladney said.
‘The real big predators’
Husband and wife duo Karen and Tom Holt, both professors at Michigan State University’s School of Criminal Justice, have spent much of their careers exploring the intersection of sexual criminology and the internet. The former’s research revolves around “sexual deviance and offending, media and sexual violence,” while the latter studies “the role of the internet in facilitating crime and deviance.”
“Dating apps and social media have definitely made things a lot easier for people who are seeking to do harm, because they’ve changed the way that people can access victims and the type of harm people can commit,” Karen Holt said.
Holt believes the cases against alleged offenders like Fletcher, Herzing, El-Amin and Tenbrink are just scratching the surface of the issue. The sex offender registry is oversaturated with similar individuals, she said.
“Many of them don’t have criminal histories,” Holt said. “The that do end up meeting people in public are what we researchers in law enforcement call the ‘low hanging fruit.’ The real big predators, the ones doing the most damage, are the ones we never get to.”
Holt offered a similar metaphor to drive the point home.
“In terms of the psychology of law enforcement, if we’re thinking about sexual violence as a tree, it’s better to get the leaves off than to do nothing. You’re probably not going to get the whole trunk. The idea is to trim the branches and hopefully, someday, get to the trunk. But right now, this is what we can do with the resources we have.”
Gladney echoed this take. His task force is part of Michigan’s spur in a larger federal effort that dedicated $40.8 million in 2023 to combat internet predators nationwide. However, he said more support is needed to address a rising caseload.
“That money allows us to do the training that we need to stay current on emerging technology trends. That being said, the digital forensics field is cutting edge by its nature, which is always top dollar. While software companies are in business to make money, their tools are very expensive, and those increasing prices have been difficult to keep up with,” Gladney said.
According to Gladney, Michigan’s statewide ICAC officials receive anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 calls per month about individuals seeking minors on the internet for sex, sharing explicit sexual images or videos of minors and similar crimes.
“Two thousand tips is too many per month for the 20 investigators we have statewide. So, a triage is necessary, and the only way to arrest more people is to get more bodies,” Gladney said.
He cited affiliate programs, which are essentially law enforcement internships providing the tools and education for forensics, plus the adoption of emerging artificial intelligence technologies as two possible strategies to increase their impact.
Tom Holt is doing his part to bolster the ranks. In September, he launched the Center for Cyber Crime Investigation and Training to help train law enforcement agents of all levels to better respond to these threats.
Larger cities often establish dedicated cybercrime units, Holt said, but resources are more limited for rural agencies. He hopes to help bridge that gap through the program, which was funded through a $1 million federal appropriation in May. Their first training session, with the Michigan Department of Corrections, is set for January.
“Research generally tells us there’s a need for this kind of training and growth. Historically, police agencies in the U.S. have put a substantial focus on traditional offenses. But we know that, especially at police academy level, there’s not great exposure to cybercrime education,” he said.
The ICAC task force has been around in some form since 1998, but Holt said dating apps and social media have provided a new “opportunity factor” for would-be offenders to victimize minors.
“The subset of people using technology for this kind of behavior has been there, but it’s been simplified in dramatic ways. There’s always going to be people who are interested in doing this kind of thing, but there are others who might not have thought about it previously who use social media to try to engage with youth,” he said.
Muddy water
Karen Holt said some patterns have remained consistent before and after the advent of dating apps. At the top of the list is the tendency for perpetrators to seek out the most vulnerable victims. Often, this includes those in “minority groups and stigmatized populations like gay men.”
“They’re going after people who are more marginalized. They’re good at picking up on the people who don’t have as much protection, with lower self-esteem and who may have been abused, because they’re more accessible to them,” she said.
“I think credibility is a big part of it,” she added. “If a victim were to come forward, the more the offender can challenge their claims, the better, from their perspective. They want to make the victim seem less credible. In terms of selecting victims, I think that’s a big part of it.”
A notable through-line in the four prominent local cases was the age investigators chose to attribute to their decoy officers. At 15 years old, all were theoretically within a year of reaching Michigan’s age of consent.
In Gladney’s words, the age of consent can “muddy the waters.” Karen Holt said it also complicates cases where men like Fletcher and Herzing allegedly sought same-sex relationships on the internet.
“If you’re saying you’re a 15-year-old boy and the age of consent is 16, and then you throw in the stigma and marginalization of the gay community, it gets really difficult. Some of these kids may have this attraction and be struggling with their orientation, and when they get on an app like Grindr, they realize they’re also looking for mentorship,” she said.
She attributed this perspective to one of several gay men she’s spoken to for her research.
“He said it can be really tough, because you may remember how, when you were a teenager, you couldn’t talk about it. It wasn’t that long ago that homosexuality was criminalized and considered a mental disease. So, I think there are more dynamics going on there than we necessarily see,” Holt said.
There’s plenty of data to support this theory. A 2017 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health noted that “gay adolescents are more likely to report online partner seeking.”
Meanwhile, a 2021 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry stated that dating apps “targeted toward sexual minority people provide platforms whereby youth can explore their identity from the privacy of their smartphones.” It noted that more than half of teens aged 14 to 17, regardless of sexual orientation, fabricate their age to use dating apps.
While this doesn’t exonerate those men, Karen Holt said there needs to be a greater effort to “explain and understand” their behavior to help prevent similar cases in the future. This is stymied by what she described as a cultural distaste for “open discussions about sex.”
“We can’t even talk about normative sexual behavior without kind of panicking. I think we really fail in terms of giving our young people the tools that they need, in my opinion, because we’re constantly putting band-aids on, rather than addressing the root problem,” she said.
Of the many platforms state ICAC investigators conduct sting operations on, Gladney said Grindr is “not one that we focus on.”“Our investigations cover the gamut of media apps, and we try to be on as many platforms as we can. Grindr is just one of the many that we have a presence on, and simply where those two cases happened to stem from,” he said.
He reiterated that busts often come as a result of broader efforts to identify human trafficking operations.
“It’s not always just apps. There are also websites out there that serve as human trafficking forums. While we still care if juveniles are involved, no matter what, the primary focus of operations like this are on the human trafficking side. And we see that on any and all platforms,” Gladney said.
To him, it’s not so much the method, but the motive, that fuels these offenders.
“Most apps are typically created for positive reasons. It’s just that some people are very good at exploiting those services for their own bad intent,” Gladney said. “If it exists and the platform doesn’t catch it, people will use it for those means, because, typically, the offenders go where the customer base is.”
What are dating application companies doing to mitigate the issue?
Other services, including some online gambling outlets and recreational marijuana dispensaries, require users to upload an image of a state-issued ID to verify their age before they can register.
Gladney is familiar with that strategy. He cited a 2023 Texas state law requiring pornography viewers to verify their age before accessing the explicit content as another example. It led Pornhub to block user access altogether in the state and is now being challenged in court.
“The main concern around that law is privacy. People don’t want to have everything that they’re doing on the internet tracked. Some of it lies in a desire for anonymity, which also ties into personal safety,” he said.
Karen Holt isn’t optimistic that dating app companies will adopt age verification protocols. Under the Communications Decency Act, dating app companies are protected from legal liability involving sexual abuse or exploitation.
“I don’t think appealing to their sense of morality or values is going to do much, unfortunately,” she said. “But I always keep wondering, what’s the tipping point going to be?”
Sting operations can only do so much, she explained. The rise of child sexual abuse material, or explicit sexual content depicting a minor, is another major concern.
“The law enforcement that I have worked with and talked to are all cognizant that this is not ideal. These are guys who are not necessarily good people, and who are in some cases looking to do harm. But you don’t know that for sure, because, in a sting operation, there’s no real victim. We don’t know what would have happened, so it’s harder to hold them fully accountable for something they didn’t even do,” she said.
It’s just one tool in a broader effort to combat the victimization of minors.
“We all want to stop sexual violence. But if you look at who is the biggest danger, it’s not the internet predator online, it’s mostly people we know and trust. Law enforcement is trying to do something, but at the same time they know that they don’t have the impact that they would like with sting operations,” Karen Holt said.
Gladney urged youths who are interested in getting into the field to stay engaged to help curb the rising numbers in the future.
“If that looks like not majoring in criminal justice and majoring in a computer field instead, I would personally recommend doing that,” he said. “The academy will teach you how to be a police officer, but departments don’t have the capability to teach you how to be a computer engineer. Having those skills will set you apart from the other people who are also in the same seat as you.”
— TYLER SCHNEIDER
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