AUGUSTA – The Senate chairman of the Legislature’s Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee said Maine can no longer afford to rely on a patchwork strategy to combat child pornography and other computer-driven crimes.

During the legislative panel’s Wednesday meeting, Sen. Bill Diamond, D-Windham, told Col. Craig A. Poulin, chief of the Maine State Police, that the Legislature requires a better understanding of what is needed to deter those who rely on computers and the Internet to commit crimes.

“I’m getting a little frustrated here,” Diamond said. “What I’m saying to you is that what we need in the state of Maine is a coordinated effort from the state of Maine – not having to depend on Lewiston or Bangor or anybody else. We need their cooperation and input, but we need to have our own. Can you give this committee an outline of what that organization would look like and in your vision, what that would be?”

Poulin assured the committee’s Senate chairman that he could prepare the blueprint for just such a new agency within the Maine State Police and deliver it to the panel by the end of January.

For now, however, Poulin concedes the state’s ability to fight computer crimes is “way, way behind the times.”

Poulin said that in today’s field of criminal investigation, computer forensics are what fingerprints were 80 years ago and DNA identification was 15 years ago.

The state’s efforts to investigate computer crimes is built around a 1999 collaborative campaign with the Lewiston Police Department which, in association with other agencies, obtained a grant to start a computer forensics unit in 1998.

Poulin said Maine’s Computer Crimes Task Force now consists of one full-time officer and a part-time officer from Lewiston.

The unit is supervised by a state police sergeant and bolstered by two full-time state police detectives. Plans are under way to add a state research associate to manage backlogged cases.

“The challenge comes from being able to sustain the operation,” Poulin said. “Right now there are around 51 cases with 80-odd computers attached to them and they’re not all child pornography cases.”

With some investigation backlogs building, Poulin said that even an additional six people in the laboratory would not do much to get ahead of the incoming complaints.

“I think it’s become evident that we can’t view this as something that we can do if we have the resources or the time,” Poulin said. “It isn’t something we can do on the cheap. Frankly, I think the Lewiston Police Department and other municipal law enforcement agencies have done a disproportionate share of work by doing work for the entire state of Maine.”

Diamond allowed that while cooperative state and municipal effort was an appropriate way to begin the fledgling effort of investigating computer crimes, the rise in the incidents of child pornography trafficking and the solicitation of children by adults for sexual encounters demanded a stronger and singular state response.

“And we can’t expect the Legislature to put this together or for the people of Maine to support it if they don’t know what it is or how severe these pornographic computer cases are,” Diamond said.

Referring to the state Computer Crimes Task Force’s 2004 report, Rep. Richard M. Sykes, R-Harrison, said the unit’s 510 investigations in 2004 were up 75 percent from 2002, a period when Internet crimes against children increased by 173 percent.

Meanwhile, the unit’s budget was cut by 54 percent and the staff decreased from three to two.