A Prince Albert courtroom is hearing about a child porn investigation of a Fond du Lac RCMP officer.
An RCMP officer is on trial after entering not guilty pleas to charges of accessing and possessing child pornography in January.
Aiden Pratchett has been suspended with pay since last October when the Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) unit first entered a child pornography investigation that led to Pratchett being officially charged two months later.
On Monday, court heard from the lead investigator on Pratchett’s file. Constable Christopher Lair with Prince Albert’s ICE unit was the only witness of the day. He also played video of interviews between himself, another officer, and Pratchett.
Testimony started off with Lair explaining the complex database police have to show files that are flagged as child pornography. These files are shared through online peer-to-peer file sharing, in which people download content – such as images or videos – from multiple people at the same time.
Police have a log of content that it considers child pornography, and tracks it with its database.
Lair was first notified that someone within his jurisdiction was downloading flagged content on Sept. 29, 2014. Within the next few weeks he verified that it was child pornography and found the IP address of the person who owned it.
Once Lair found the address as the Fond du Lac RCMP compound, he suspected the person accessing that porn was an officer.
And in October of 2014, Lair and other officers flew to Fond du Lac in an operation that had to be kept quiet. They didn’t want to tip off anyone with the local RCMP about why they were there.
Immediately after landing, Lair and his team detained anyone who may have used the WiFi password for Pratchett’s home. This included Pratchett, his wife, and a colleague who was sharing the duplex he lived in.
Lair explained, anyone with access to that password was a suspect.
Search warrants led to the seizure of three computers from Pratchett’s home.
The court viewed video of Pratchett’s first interviews after he’d been detained.
In the video he says he does not have any child porn on his computer. But Pratchett does say he is concerned that his computer had been compromised, which could lead to illegal material ending up on his devices.
Pratchett’s interview with Lair lasts at least an hour. At one point he says even if he’s cleared of the charge, the response from his employer – the RCMP – to Pratchett being investigated “concerns me greatly.”
Pratchett referenced a co-worker who had been transferred after a rumour popped up online. Even after being cleared from a nine-month investigation, Pratchett said, his colleague was transferred to a different community.
Video of Lair speaking with Pratchett shows that he was not willing to hand over the passwords for some of his encrypted drives.
So far in court, the only thing treated as fact was that someone using Pratchett’s Internet connection had downloaded an explicit image.
Whether it was Pratchett himself, has not been discussed.
The trial is scheduled to go until Friday in Prince Albert.