Dozens arrested during police child sex offender blitz
SA Police made 24 arrests and say one person was “saved from further abuse” during two days of compliance raids on registered child sex offenders across the state.
The blitz on the SA home addresses of 377 people registered on the Australian National Child Offender Register took place last week as part of Operation Child Safe.
The operation involved 177 police officers and was timed to coincide with National Child Protection Week.
SA Police said today that 267 of the offenders’ addresses were occupied when officers arrived, with 24 arrests and 62 offenders charged with breaching their ANCOR obligations, as well as other offences.
Acting Assistant Commissioner of Crime Service Stephen Taylor said it was ‘disturbing’ to see the amount of breaches found by the operation, with one victim been identified through the operation.
“There’s certainly been one person that I’m aware of that has been saved from further abuse, we would anticipate further charges will probably be forthcoming once the analysis of all that material is done,” Taylor said.
Of the 24 arrested, 13 were charged with possessing child exploitation material and three with having reportable child contact.
Six were remanded in custody to face court at a later date.
One offender was arrested for breaching parole conditions, with another charged with aggravated indecent assault.
“In total, we seized 51 devices, electronic devices including things such as computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones,” Taylor said.
“One person was also charged with failing to provide the password for one of these devices.
“All of that material is currently before digital forensic experts, and that’ll be analysed and we anticipate there’ll probably be further charges at a later stage for some of those people.”
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Taylor stressed that police routinely make checks on registered offenders, year round.
“This this is obviously a very large scale operation but that’s not to say this is not business as usual,” he said.
“We constantly go out every week our detectives go to different addresses and search for compliance.
“It’s not unusual for us to normally hit 10 or 20 places per week, every week.”
