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CELINA - City councilors on Monday night learned the police department is sponsoring a free community event aimed at teaching people how to keep themselves and their children safe from myriad dangers lurking online.
They also moved to enter into an agreement with Ohio Department of Natural Resources for a $50,000 reimbursable grant to get an urban tree program off the ground.
Police Chief Tom Wale said Capt. Scott Frank, a retired investigator with the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) Task Force Program, will bring his "Digital Empowerment Project" to Market Hall at the Mercer County Fairgrounds from 7-9 p.m Sunday, May 5.
The ICAC covers the entire country and is made up of federal, state and local agencies, Wale said, characterizing it as "a big deal."
"I guess what I'm trying to say is this guy knows what he's doing and what he's talking about," Wale said of Frank. "Local clergy approached me and said he's going to be in town. They are footing his bill to be here, but the police department, we're going to sponsor a school event and a public event."
Frank will discuss current trends such as the dark web, online risks including sexting, pornography and predators and ways people can empower themselves online, according to Wale.
"There's a lot of internet crime that goes on, particularly against our children and against the public in general," Wale said. "Most of these crimes are very difficult, if not impossible to investigate. They use the dark web."
The dark web is a part of the internet hosted within an encrypted network and accessible only through specialized anonymity-providing tools, according to The Associated Press.
"It's not hard to use the dark web. These people get on it and their signal will bounce all over the globe to servers," Wale said. "These servers have been hacked, and they're used to bounce signals around, so it takes very high level of skill, high level of resources to actually be able to track these."
When the police department relays information about an online crime, the FBI generally takes note of it and "it goes away in a file somewhere."
"There's so much of it, they're only going to go after the really big ones," he said.
Wale invites everyone, not just Celina residents, to attend the free presentation at the fairgrounds.
"This is very important for us to look at," mayor Jeff Hazel said. "Our kids out there don't realize what they're stepping into. The dark web is real."
"He's going to really open your eyes up if you go to this event," Wale said. "This is geared mainly on protecting your children, but there's also going to be a lot that you're going to be able to learn to protect yourself."
Some Celina residents have exhausted their savings and/or cracked open their nest eggs in pursuit of romance, extraordinary prizes or other outcomes that wind up being scams, many of which originate from overseas, Wale told the newspaper in 2022.
Wale said in 2021, local victims were swindled out of roughly $500,000. That figure was calculated based on police reports totaling $300,000 plus one account involving a loss of $200,000 where the victim declined to file a report.
"Just a few years ago, we took several hundred thousand dollars in reports on people … scammed right here in town," Wale told councilors. "If you take that countywide, you're probably in excess of seven figures, easily."
In other business, councilors suspended the rules requiring three public readings and passed an emergency ordinance authorizing the city to enter into an agreement with ODNR, acting through its Division of Forestry, for a $50,000 reimbursable grant to establish an urban tree program in Celina.
The federal funds will go toward tree care and plating contractors, supplies for free care and plantings, educational and related professional services and other costs associated with a tree program.
The city's grant application indicates Celina's tree canopy suffered greatly as a result of the devastation of two main street tree types, Elm and Ash, over the decades.
"Celina, which had beautiful treelined streets and a significant tree canopy, has lost most of its tree canopy environment," the application reads. "Over the past few years, new street reconstruction projects have increased the loss of street trees within the City drawing the community attention to the (loss) of the City's tree canopy."
A newly established city tree commission hopes to reverse that trend.
