CHEYENNE — Legislators will consider how to support the Internet Crimes Against Children task force during the interim session following reports of it being understaffed and amid a spike in cyber tips.

Members of the Joint Judiciary Committee were informed of these challenges Monday by Chris McDonald, special agent and commander of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s ICAC task force. He said the unit is made up of six agents spread out across three regional units, fielding hundreds of reports a year, and there has been a strain on resources attempting to handle every case.

McDonald came onto the task force in 2018, and he said there were 199 cyber tips traced to Wyoming that year.Those tips are reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children for suspected child pornography and sexual assault material on social media servers — spanning platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok.

In 2022, the number of tips rose to 792.

“As a unit, we received about 66 tips per month,” he said. “Another way to think about that is if you had 66, say, highway interdictions in a month, it would overwhelm the best unit.”

McDonald described responding to the tips as a call to service and reactive cases, similar to one a patrol officer might get on the street. Even though agents are not able to respond to every tip, and it doesn’t always lead to an official investigation, all tips must be vetted.

But the task force isn’t only responsible for handling cyber tips.

The commander said the unit is attempting to balance reactive and proactive responsibilities, and it’s difficult to deprioritize the cyber tip cases when it’s a “productive case.”

“When we talk about production, what would come to mind most recently is cases where individuals in the state of Wyoming are sexually assaulting children, videotaping or taking photographs of that, and then sending or trading that material with others that are like-minded,” he said. “Those are the cases that we work on a daily basis.Those are difficult when you work with cyber tips, even if it’s just a one-file cyber tip.”

He said they don’t want to…