CHICAGO (WLS) -- For months, ABC7 has been following Cook County sheriff's police behind closed doors, getting an inside look at how they track down and arrest suspected child predators.
On Sunday night, we showed you investigators wrapping up a months-long case and arresting a man accused of possessing and soliciting child pornography.
Now, we sit down with Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart to better understand the scale of this exploding segment of crime.
"This is not the old days of just a handful of people sharing some photographs via the mail to each other," Dart said.
Dart is exasperated.
"This is something on the internet that is exponentially gone from about 3,000 photographs a year to about 50 million. It's everywhere, and then, law enforcement is overwhelmed with it," Dart said.
Dart has an entire team of investigators specifically assigned to catch people who sexually exploit children online. Since 2020, investigations by the sheriff's Internet Crimes Against Children Unit have led to charges against 49 people for cases involving the victimization of children and child pornography.
Bodycam video shows police questioning Vincent Salvaggio. Salvaggio was sentenced last summer to more than 10 years in prison for sharing and possessing child pornography.
"What I care about right now is what's on your phone that shouldn't be on your phone," investigator Daniel Codd says in the footage.
"Can I delete some?" Salvaggio laughs in response.
A registered sex offender in Illinois, Salvaggio was previously convicted in 2010 in North Carolina for criminal sexual abuse of an underage child.
In another arrest, sheriff's police questioned Jan Bautista, who they say admitted to using his cellphone to view, download and share images and videos of children engaging in sexual acts.
"What's the youngest that you saw on any of them?" an investigator asked.
"Under 1," Bautista responded.
Bautista was convicted, but avoided prison time, instead sentenced to 30 months of "sex offender probation."
In 2023 alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC, said its CyberTipline received 36.2 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation online.
In 2021, NCMEC said, it received 29.4 million reports, a 23% increase in just two years.
And since its inception in 1998, the CyberTipline says it has received more than 180 million reports in total. For context, a fifth of those reports came just last year.
"When we started this, I knew we were going to have some work, but I didn't know we were going to have this much work. I did not think child pornography, child sexual abuse material, child exploitation, I didn't know it was going to be as big as it actually is," said Cook Co. Sheriff's Internet Crimes Against Children Unit Lt. James Draz.
The vast majority of the reports to NCMEC come from electronic service providers, a broad classification ranging from social media and cloud-based storage to internet and cell service providers.
"When people like me and other folks who sit there and say, 'Listen, do you folks mind, with all the billions of dollars you're making, maybe you give a little bit to try to deal with this horrific crime? Do you not feel that you have some role in this that maybe you might want to help?' And the answer is usually crickets," Dart said.
NCMEC says U.S.-based ESPs are legally required to report child sexual abuse material when they become of aware of it. However, there are no legal obligations for those companies to proactively monitor their platforms for this kind of content.
"People are now talking more so than ever before about making some legislative changes. So, it's an ideal time for people to be engaged right now," Dart said.
It has been more than a decade since Congress enacted meaningful legislation to protect children on the internet. Federal laws on the books were written before Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok were even invented. However, just this summer, two bills aimed at keeping kids safe online passed the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support.
"This is a historic moment. This is a moment when the Senate has said, 'There have been horrible abuses. We must end them, and we will,'" said U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The bills now head to the House, where the earliest they will be considered is September.
Snap, X, and Microsoft endorse the Kids Online Safety Act. However, free speech advocates, other tech companies, including Facebook's parent company Meta, and internet lobbying groups say these bills threaten free speech online. And while politicians and powerful executives spar in Washington, the Cook County sheriff is going after suspected child predators one by one.
"We will catch people. Will we catch everyone? No, of course not. Will we catch an individual that thinks they're going to be safe? Yeah, we will we and we have we will continue to do that," Dart said.
Dart said what he hopes people get from this is that child sexual exploitation takes many forms, and it is incredibly prevalent.
He said if people gain an understanding of what law enforcement officials are up against and what lurks on the internet and in our communities, then they can take their concerns to lawmakers and prioritize this problem at the polls.