SUDBURY -- The Greater Sudbury Police Service is dealing with a large cybercrime workload increase and is hoping additional funding will help to alleviate some of the pressure officers are facing.

In an update to the Greater Sudbury Police Services Board on Wednesday, members learned the city’s three staff members in the Internet Child Exploitation Unit still have 10-million photographs to categorize.

Members of the unit deal with two types of cybercrime: crimes where technology is the target, such as hacking and ransomware, and crimes facilitated by technology such as fraud, human trafficking, and internet crimes against children.

When it comes to child abuse images, in 2008 police were dealing with fewer than 1 million images, which grew to 45 million images of child abuse in 2018.

"We use a definite triage for every investigation. Our investigations, we can put in order of seriousness and that’s very fluid, depending on the amount of investigations we have coming in," said Detective Sergeant Blair Ramsay. "We do have quite a few investigations coming in, but we do a really good job of working with our partners to help us move those investigations along."

According to Ramsay, the city has seen a 4 to 5 per cent increase in cases every year, both in proactively monitoring cases and accepting international cases.

There are roughly 1 million visits a day to child exploitation forums on the darknet, which keeps officers constantly looking for new and different ways to weed the predators out online.

"The part of our investigations, they flow into the technological area and the computer forensic field. That’s a very intense field of investigations, getting into a computer and using specific forensic tools, it takes highly educated staff to do that, and that’s coupled with the changes in technology," said Ramsay.

Detective Sergeant Ramsay told board members with each new smart phone, they’re dealing with new levels of encryption. Where that presents a problem is they now are looking at turnaround times of 4 to 5 months, if they don’t have passwords to the device they’ve seized.

The clock is ticking with each and every investigation; they’re on a tight time frame after the Supreme Court of Canada’s Jordan decision, which puts time limits of 18 months for general division investigations and 30 months for more serious cases.

"We have to be cognisant of that because we don’t want to go over those specific time frames," said Ramsay.

One of the partners police work with is the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) of the Districts of Sudbury and Manitoulin.

"In my years as a practicing social worker in the city here and working with victim's services for a lot of years, this has been a subject that has been of critical importance for all of us," said local CAS Executive Director Elaina Groves. "The fact that the resources are limited has been an ongoing issue. Police services have no choice but to deal with the complaints as they come in and they don’t simply have the resources to meet all the demands that are there. It’s an international problem."

Children’s Aid has also seen its workload dramatically increase and they only get involved with a fraction of the cases. The organization looks at the safety of children and if they’re in need of protection from their caregiver.

"Over the number of years, it continues to increase. We see it sometimes wain in and out, and we think that might be more an issue of police resources, because it will come in several cases at once, and then a little bit of a lull, and several more cases at another time,” said Groves.

Groves, who has also worked with the Attorney General’s office, has attended workshops where she has seen first-hand police officers pretending to be youth online.

"I sat there as a parent, sitting through some workshops, and despite working victim's services for a few decades, I was actually shocked when I saw how quickly and how pervasive the offenders were and how easily accessible they had to youth or pretend-youth in that case, police officers pretending to be in that role, so it was shocking to me as a parent," she said.

Groves is hoping there will be more partnerships within the community to help combat some of the exploitation now being seen online.

"We have a two-fold problem here. We have those who exploit by use of the images and share them, but we have those who actually offend children, and offend against children, and cause them serious harm and grievous harm. So, we need to be concerned on two levels when you talk about the high number incidents of child, images of child, I hate to say child pornography, it’s images of child abuse is what it is, having those all over the system in Ontario. How do we then track those who are also offenders?" said Groves.

One of the things that Ramsay recommends to parents is the use of Cybertip.ca for tips and suggestions.

"Just from my perspective, learn. Parents need to learn, parents and caregivers have to learn, what I call the 'new playground,' which is the Internet, said Ramsay. "And learn what the kids are doing. Set up accounts with social media that the kids are on and learn it, so you can understand and be able to teach your kids how to be safe."

On average, the Greater Sudbury Police Service Internet Child Exploitation and Computer Forensics Unit deals with 50 to 60 cases at a time.

Wednesday's presentation comes amid a request to the City of Greater Sudbury for a 5 per cent increase to the police budget.

Police officials say if the increase is approved, they would use those funds to dedicate more officers to the unit to help with some of the workload.