BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Mark Geist is the founder of the Shadow Warriors Project (SWP), and while traveling to help aid veterans and private contractors, he decided to take on a different project: equipping law enforcement with K-9s trained to detect devices that store and distribute child sexual abuse materials.
SWP partnered with Saving Children and Reviving Souls (SCARS) along the way. Brentt Tumey with SCARS said, "If we just meet the children and take care of the children, everything else is gonna fall in line."
"It's a sad state of affairs that we have to educate our kids on how to not be victims," said Geist.
When asked how the K-9s track down electronics, Geist said, "It's an odor that is on every electronic device— there's a molecule there, so we can identify that exact molecule and build training aids around that."
Benton County Sheriff Shawn Holloway said having trained K-9s for this matter is useful when going on search warrants, to help detect small storage devices.
"It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we just eliminated that. Now we're looking for the bale of hay in the barn," said Holloway. "Digital technology is so small; in the past, we were searching for hard drives in computers, but now ... It's on smaller devices"
Benton County now has two K-9s that are trained to detect storage devices, and Geist wants the program to continue to grow nationally. "Let's just get two in every state," said Geist.
Having these K-9s will help investigate more cases in Benton County.
“That dog is a tool that will help us solve cases that we might have missed," said Holloway. "Unfathomable things are happening."
"[All] communities are exposed to this type of crime, it's probably the biggest threat that we have to our country," said Geist.
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