“Operation Volcano”: Eruption or Just a Fizzle?
The Riverside County, California DA’s Office is touting “Operation Volcano” as a major crackdown on child sexual exploitation. But when you actually look at the numbers, the headlines may be more explosive than the results.
According to the DA, this was a “yearlong, multi-agency operation” conducted from March 2025 through March 2026. Investigators reportedly identified more than 500 suspected distributors of child sexual abuse material linked to peer-to-peer networks. Yet after a full year of investigations, search warrants, and cooperation between numerous agencies, the operation resulted in only 42 arrests. The other remarkable stat is that only 3 of the 42 arrested individuals were registered sex offenders.
Think about that for a moment. Less than 1% of the suspected individuals were people already on a registry, and registered offenders made up less than one-tenth of those actually arrested. Meanwhile, among those arrests were: A child psychologist, a doctor, and a retired law enforcement employee.
These details should force an uncomfortable but necessary conversation about public assumptions surrounding sexual offenses and who commits them. The common narrative pushed on the public is that registries are filled with the “most dangerous predators” and that those individuals are the primary threat. Yet this operation itself appears to tell a different story. If anything, Operation Volcano suggests that risk is far more complex than a public registry map. People in positions of trust, authority, education, healthcare, and law enforcement were allegedly involved, while only a tiny fraction were already registered offenders.
That does not minimize the seriousness of the allegations, nor does it suggest that these types of operations are not necessary. But it does challenge the simplistic public beliefs that registries are keeping us safe and registrants are who we need to watch out for. According to city-data.com, there are rougly 3,800 registrants in Riverside County. So the fact that during a years-long investigation only 3 of them fell into this net is more important in highlighting that 99.9% didn’t! This begs the question; are registries actually targeting future risk effectively, or are they mostly branding a small, visible subset of people while ignoring broader realities?
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Spending money on filtering this garbage off the Internet would have to cost much less than than incarcerating hundreds, perhaps thousands of new individuals each year, along with the thousands already rotting in prisons for the same.
One way you could filter this material off the internet would be to flag the peer-to-peer networks that contain it, identify the IP addresses that are uploading it to those peer-to-peer networks, then arresting the users behind those uploads and taking those users offline.
Which is apparently what happened here, according to the linked press release.
If there is a safer, more effective way to eliminate CSAM from the internet, I’m open to hearing what that is. What else do you do when a peer-to-peer network does no filtering nor consents to third-party (including government) monitoring? What do you do about users who seek to bypass filtering?
Anyway, FAC’s point in this article is that one well-known tool made no dent in filtering this content at all: registration!
All these “operations” do is disprove the “frightening and high” myth the courts love to fall back on. If the reoffense rate was really what they claim then 80%+> would have been caught, not just 3. If anything it proves that the registry false claims it lists “known offenders” when it fact it doesn’t taken into account that they’re NOT currently offending. Which proves the high recidivism rate is also fictitious. Most caught with CSM do not exhibit TRUE pedophilic behavior as it’s more of a compulsion and addiction thing. Yet, the media and law enforcement makes them out to be “predators” even though they never seek out real children.
It would have looked much better if o% were registered. But yes it goes to show that there are a hell of alot of so called normal people doing bad stuff. And even worse they are officials. Where is the end of it all?.
And I’ll bet the 3 registrants arrested here were perfectly, 100% registry compliant.
So again, someone please tell me how the registry is a critical public safety and anti-sexual-recidivism tool.
one thing everyone has to fearful of is when they spend a ton of money on operations like this and the result is a failure for them. They will “Create” offenders so that the money & man hours they use can be justified to the public.
Nothing scarier than a failed full blown crackdown on this or that especially if its done by a blowhard like sheriff Judd who’s numbers are no better than most sheriffs in Florida but likes to have his face on camera as much as he can.
That is dangerous because he cannot look bad in the eye of the public no matter what he has to do to make himself look good
ummmm…actually, 7%.
3/42 = 0.071 (7.1%)
Still, it is a small sample, statistically speaking.
The larger sample of 500 would be 0.6% (3/500 = 0.006).
But, yes, this shows that people from all walks of life get ensnared by that stuff – not just “creeps” – but ordinary people.
it’s 3 out of 500 suspects.
3/500 = 0.006 (0.6%)
The post says, “Less than 1% of the suspected individuals were people already on a registry, and registered offenders made up less than one-tenth of those actually arrested.”