Landeros | DNSO

A 29-year-old Crescent City man is accused of possessing more than 100 videos of child pornography with some veering into the realm of assault, Police Chief Richard Griffin told the Wild Rivers Outpost on Sunday.

Officers arrested Roberto Landeros at his home on the 1300 block of West Washington Boulevard on Thursday after receiving a tip from the Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, Griffin said.
Crescent City police received three different search warrants to go through Landeros’s subscriber information and internet provider addresses, the police chief said. Officers executed a search warrant at Landeros’s home on Thursday, interviewed him and took him into custody.

Landeros was booked into the Del Norte County Jail. Salary records from 2022 show him employed as a corrections officer at Pelican Bay State Prison. He made bail and was released before appearing for arraignment on Friday, Griffin told the Outpost. Landeros’s bail was $35,000, Griffin said.

According to the police chief, the suspect posted bail as his officers discovered another 19 gigabytes of material on several online accounts while serving a follow-up search warrant.

“We’re still going through several different online and dark web accounts,” Griffin said, adding that CCPD hadn’t recognized any local children in any of the material they found associated with Landeros. “We do review all of them, sit there and watch it, with the purpose [to see] if there are any locals or not. He’s not producing it, he’s downloading it.”

According to Griffin, each video and photo his department seizes in a child pornography case receives a serial number, also known as a hash value, and is uploaded to a national database to assist other agencies with searches.

The Crescent City Police Department has been working with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force for more than two years, Griffin said. The chief said he was working with ICAC since his days at the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office.

Though he said he hasn’t seen a “distinct volume increase,” the number of tips Griffin’s officers are acting on has been coming in more steadily. Griffin said he was putting a special emphasis on child pornography and cyber sex crimes involving children.

“We’ve created an in-house cyber unit so we can focus on forensics when we do get cases,” he said. “And we do get together — myself, Det. [Ethan Miller] and Sgt. [Alex] Pearson — we tackle cases together, review them and come up with a game plan on how to get them done quicker than before. We’re definitely putting a heavy effort into this. All the officers are on board whether to help out with search warrants, to serve them, or bag and tag evidence.”

CCPD also has an agreement with the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office to handle ICAC cases within the unincorporated areas of the county, Griffin told the Outpost. Griffin also credited Crescent City’s Measure S sales tax measure for allowing his department to purchase the equipment needed to act on ICAC tips. This includes the purchase of a cell phone analyzer, he said.

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