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Survey calls Louisville "most obscene" city in U.S.

A new survey lists Louisville as the most obscene city in the U.S.  Google says there are more Internet searches for obscene material out of our area than anywhere else in the country.

Over the last few weeks, Metro Police and Kentucky State Police have spent hours online trying to take predators off our streets.  As Detective Michael Arterburn puts it, "Its pretty scary to know that these guys are as aggressive as they are."

Arterburn and other officers have spent the last few weeks posing as children in Kentucky internet chat rooms.  "The age," Arterburn says, "ranges were from 12 to 15 years of age."  He says fourteen men had sexual chats with officers posing as children and one by one the men took the conversations a step further:  "All of them led to a meeting for sex, all but two followed through with that meeting."

When the men arrived at the meeting location in Louisville, police say they came with a couple of cell phones and prepared to have sex.  Detective William Lindon of the Kentucky State Police says, "There is such a large number of people out here trying to entice minors that it is just hard to understand and hard to fathom."

Detective Lindon was also a part of the online sting that stretched all the way to Lexington. Lindon says one of the men he chatted with, Jeffrey Cox, was about to begin training as a Jefferson County School bus driver.  Lindon says, "He was going through orientation the next day."

Police say the other men arrested appear to be normal people, but like all sexual predators are living a secret life behind closed doors.  Det. Dan Jackman of the Louisville Metro Police Department explains, "They're a complete Jeckyl and Hyde.  Meeting them during the daytime they're one person, very nice, maybe a pillar of the community, things like that, but when they get home on the computer they're a completely different person."

Detective Jackman says the online predator problem and child porn problem in our area is so bad it is getting national attention, such as a Google story that puts Louisville number one in the country for most obscene city for searching explicit material such as child porn.  He says, "Today Detective Arterburn and I are seeing more and more bondage, torture occuring to kids."

It gets worse -- Jackman says the kids in the child porn are so young they have no idea what is happening to them:  "They're of infants, of babies zero to two years old, sometimes they're toddlers."  Jackman says offenders in Louisville are primarily purchasing child porn, not producing it.  And most of the searches are coming from homes in the East End of Jefferson County.  "Every case we have the potential to have a real victim here in Louisville, every case more or less has the potential to have a child in danger, and that's the number one priority is rescuing the children."

If found guilty, detectives say the fourteen men arrested could face up to five years in prison, and even more if the charges go to federal court.  If you would like to find out what sex crimes have been committed in your neighborhood and by whom, click here.