Wednesday, April 27, 2005

FUNNY OR SAD

Who knew that child molesters were such huge Star Trek fans? If any of you reading know whether or not this is funny, would you please let me know in the comments? Because seriously, I just don't know.

Gillespie has been on that knife's edge since the Child Exploitation Section was created four years ago. The Toronto police seized more than 2 million pictures and videos of child sexual abuse in 2003. So far, the world's law agencies have identified fewer than 500 of the children.

Their work is a daily sojourn to the underworld. Gillespie has a team of 10 men and six women who spend hours in front of their computers, extracting leads, writing warrants and sifting photos for clues. The payoff is the day they get to kick down a door and take the "bad guy" away. The mood is light and the humor often off-color to ease the horror.

On one wall is a "Star Trek" poster with investigators' faces substituted for the Starship Enterprise crew. But even that alludes to a dark fact of their work: All but one of the offenders they have arrested in the last four years was a hard-core Trekkie.

4 comments:

Ian said...

I vote sad. Possibly both with the right tagline, maybe something like "How do you say 'Want some candy?' in Klingon?" But probably not.

Anonymous said...

I vote funny, because making fun of nerds is funny and making fun of sexually abused children is also funny. And 1 + 1 doesn't equal 0.

I'd go for a "beam me up" joke.

Mathis said...

It's taken me some time to come to this conclusion, but no matter how easy it is to laugh at Star Trek fans, ultimately, this story is just downright sad.

Especially the part about the cage.

But then again, all but one of the convicted were Star Trek fans? All of them? What does this mean? The world spins.

BK/CK said...

Sad. Really sad. Is there anything sadder? Ick.

The star trek connection is intriguing though.