He sits at a desk, tapping on a computer keyboard and becomes a boy.
He's chatting with someone now. His words are full of typos, misspellings and childlike phrases.Mike Mitchell is not a boy. He s a police detective hunting for a pedophile. But the hunted doesn't know that.
The detective and the pedophile agree to a meeting place for a sexual encounter.
The pedophile believes he is meeting with a young boy.
The detective knows he is meeting with a monster.
"Back in the 1950s, people's concept of a child molester was someone in a raincoat who hid in the bushes in a park, jumped out and molested the kids," Mitchell said. "We all know today that's not the way it is."
Today, the pedophile out there can be someone lurking on the Internet, plying old tricks of the trade to lure young victims into sexual exchanges.
Mitchell, a detective with the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office, has been investigating child sex crimes on the Internet for about a year. "I don't think people realize how big it is," he said.
Mitchell is a proponent of legislation being pushed by Rep. Perry Buckner, who is a Salt Lake County sheriff's deputy. Buckner, D-Kearns, wants the state to have the ability to seize and keep a person's computer after that person has been convicted of a computer-assisted sex crime against a minor.
"It makes sense to take away the tool of the crime away from the criminal," Mitchell said.
The Legislature's Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee is set to discuss it Wednesday.
Salt Lake County and Salt Lake City are among the few entities whose law enforcement agencies across the state have detectives trained to investigate sex crimes against children that start with a computer. Both units were organized officially last year.
Salt Lake Police Sgt. Ken Hansen met a vice cop from Chicago at a conference and learned about that city's investigative unit.
"He described how they put together a proactive unit that sought out these perpetrators, instead of waiting for these people to accumulate their victims," Hansen said. "It became apparent it was a service we needed."
Hansen sought training and then successfully applied for an $8,000 grant to buy equipment and pay for additional training for other officers.
It is one year and 16 cases later, a year that has taught Hansen there needs to be more effort, more training and more money thrown at the problem of Internet sex crimes committed against children.
"There's so much of it going on out there," he said. "It's evident we've barely scratched the surface."
Hansen and others hope the state will get word this week that its application for a $300,000 federal grant has been accepted.
If so, the State Attorney General's Office plans to use the money to set up an investigative task force that will coordinate efforts of local law enforcement.
Because the World Wide Web is just that, many of the cases may have local ties but quickly cross jurisdictional lines. Mitchell had one that involved a pedophile in Europe.
The case was turned over to the FBI, which turned it over to Interpol agents, who arrested the man.
Essentially, detectives find two kinds of pedophiles on the Internet.
There are those who assume false identities and lure children into meeting with them. One man sent his intended victim a photo of him when he was 15.
Other pedophiles use the Internet as an elaborate way to stockpile thousands of images of child pornography that are traded to other pedophiles.
Hansen and others believe working sex crimes on the Internet involving children is one of the best and most effective examples of proactive police work.
"There was one case we were able to get to an 8-year-old girl before she was victimized," Hansen said. "She was being groomed by a pedophile."
A girlfriend of the suspect alerted authorities and the man was apprehended before any abuse occurred.
"The parents were relieved. They were weeks away from something happening to their little girl."