From a longtime elementary teacher in San Mateo County to a principal in Costa Mesa, several California school employees have been arrested for child sexual misconduct charges just in the past month.
Can child predators working in schools be stopped before they strike?
New technology has been adopted by 12 school districts in California, including the Bay Area, aimed at doing just that, according to business owner Steve Hummel. His new software scans school-issued devices and school district networks to detect alerts of inappropriate files, like child porn.
Hummel has spent the past four decades as a private investigator helping to remove dozens of dangerous individuals from classrooms. He was about to retire five years ago when he thought of the idea of creating his business, NetPropriate.
“When I started noticing that there was inappropriate content that could have been discovered before there was a victim, that just started to irritate me,” he said.
Hummel hired software engineers to create the software. He launched NetPropriate late last year.
NetPropriate’s Steve Hummel (right) and senior investigative reporter Candice Nguyen (left).
He said the technology scans the entire computer network and is not surveillance because it doesn’t open files. Rather, it looks at the signature of the file, which is a 25-alphanumeric number called a hash. If that hash file matches any of the hash files in his company’s proprietary master database, then the system knows it’s inappropriate and puts out an alert. It is ultimately up to the school district to find out why there was an alert and decide whether to act.
Hummel reached out to the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit when he reviewed the results of those alerts since school districts started using his software.
“Just in the last eight months when we started actually using the software, [there have been] about 35 different computers with inappropriate content at various districts,” Hummel said.
NBC Bay Area isn’t identifying the school districts out of privacy concerns.
Hummel said action has been taken against at least 10 school employees ranging from termination to criminal prosecution. In many cases, the employees resigned.
He said some of those employees should never work with children.
“A teacher that every day, 30 minutes before school is browsing really serious inappropriate sites. 30 minutes after they got off shift again, hundreds of sites,” he described.
According to the anti-sexual violence organization called RAINN, most perpetrators who sexually abuse children and create and distribute child sexual abuse material are adults the child knows and trusts.
Child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, has been declared a global crisis by the child safety non-profit THORN. Since last year, there have been over 55 million suspected CSAM files reported, according to the organization.
If each file is a sheet of paper, they’d cover an entire football field 620 times. And those are just the files that’ve been found.
“I can almost guarantee you that anywhere you look for child sexual abuse material, you will find it,” said Julia Cordua, THORN’s CEO. “It is the tip of the iceberg because it’s only reported when it’s found, and there’s a lot that hasn’t been found.”
Hummel said, based on his decades of experience as a private investigator, sadly, there may be a lot to find in the Bay Area and across California.
Steve Hummel
He knows his company is not going to stop the overall problem, but he hopes it’ll give some schools a chance to get ahead of some of the cases.
Candice Nguyen is the senior investigative reporter on this story. If you have a question about this report or if you have another investigation tip, email her at candice.nguyen@nbcuni.com.
