The Lathrop Police Services program that aimed at removing child predators from the community before they had the chance to harm children was heralded with widespread acclaim when it was launched shortly after former Lathrop Police Chief and San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office Captain Ryan Biedermann took over the command.

And it has attracted the attention of the wider law enforcement community as well.

Earlier this month the California Peace Officers Association honored the deputies and detectives of Lathrop Police Services that organized an ongoing program that uses technology to identify and apprehend those looking to meet minors for sexual encounters – a program that has resulted in more than 250 arrests since its inception.

The program involves local, state, and federal resources, and has grown to include other agencies from throughout San Joaquin County that are looking to remove predators from the area before they get the opportunity to victimize a child.

The unit citation was only one of two that the organization handed out in the entire state. 

“It’s pretty humbling,” former Lathrop Police Chief and San Joaquin County Sheriff Captain Ryan Biedermann said. “It’s not like we’re recreating the wheel or anything – we found something that we wanted to approach and got really, really good at it.

“To the point that we’re training other agencies and people are seeking us out to try and replicate what we’re doing. To have that kind of recognition is humbling.”

Using a number of detectives posing as underage minor decoys online, the program sought out those that were looking to exploit the innocence of those “minors” and were willing to arrange a meeting that would more than likely involve illegal acts taking place.

The only problem was, once that person arrived at the meeting point there was no decoy present – just a team of Lathrop and San Joaquin County Sheriff’s deputies looking to make an arrest.

When Biedermann assumed the command of Lathrop after the election of San Joaquin County Sheriff Pat Withrow he used his experience as a child abuse and sexual assault detective to implement the new program, and began fine-tuning it and bringing in other resources to supplement the effort – from local agencies to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office High-Tech Crimes Task Force to federal agencies and their exhaustive resources.

The fact that it was all born out of a small contract agency like Lathrop, Biedermann said, makes the recognition from the wider law enforcement community that much more special.

“For a small little contract like Lathrop to be honored by the state – one of only two unit awards handed out – was pretty cool,” Biedermann said. “It tells you that this is a problem everywhere, and when you get everyone on the same page you can make a dent in this.

“The feds have resources that we don’t have access to and we have resources locally that they don’t have access to, and when you put everybody on the same page you can make a dent in this and make it much more effective than if you did it by yourself.”

To contact reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.