Your Stories. Our Legacy.

Nick Battaglia
Sergeant, San Jose (CA) Police Department

Upon joining the SJPD after working patrol, I was fortunate to have been chosen to join the Department’s Vice Investigations Unit where I spent the next six years. Every vice investigator was assigned a collatorial area of vice expertise in which they would receive specialized training. My assignment was pornography, an interesting topic for a young officer of 28 years old.

My first specialized training was spent in the city of Sacramento with the State’s Department of Justice for one week being trained in “Organized Crime In Pornography.” Out of that total week’s training two slides depicting young female children posing in playboy-type photos caught my attention with disbelief. They were part of a presentation given by two Los Angeles Ad-vice investigators. I was so shocked by those photographs that upon arriving home, I immediately began an inspection of all 28 adult bookstores located within the city limits of San Jose. To my disbelief, I found that most of the stores were openingly selling what we would call “child pornography.” With further disbelief, I purchased some and took them to the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office and found that the State of California did not have any specific statutes to deal with this unbelievable material.

This is what would turn out to be my main goal in my thirty plus years in law enforcement. I began lobbying the state to establish our current laws dealing with Child Pornography; starting the second Child Exploitation Unit in the country, second to Los Angeles; became an expert in Child Exploitation training law enforcement all over the world; testifying before congress to establish federal law; developing the Silicon Valley Internet Crimes Against Children Federal Task Force that included 128 San Francisco Bay Area jurisdictions. Upon retiring I became a consultant for ten years to the National Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program.

Even though I continued to work in other specialized units during my career, Mobile Emergency Respond Team (MERGE), Narcotics/Covert Investigations, Training, Burglary Investigations, and Sexual Assaults, my truest interest remained investigating the most sickening crimes against children and teaching that expertise to all law enforcement. I am very fulfilled today for my contribution in this area as I read and hear of all the investigations that are currently taking place by our hero investigators rescuing victimized children.