My Work with the National Child Protection Task Force (NCPTF)

I was in a Zoom meeting one day, unsure of what I was about to discuss. I knew that I would be introduced to the two founders of The National Child Protection Task Force (NCPTF) over in the US and that they were looking for some help. 

Kevin Metcalf and Kevin Branzetti presented the aims and capabilities of the task force to me. I was stunned by the sheer magnitude of the work they do. The task force comprises of a large group of volunteers with specific skills who come together as a team to assist with cases of trafficked, missing and exploited children. As Kevin Metcalf put it, he has a team of ‘mutants’ with weird skills working for the NCPFT from around the world and they’d like me to join them. I was honoured to become one of their mutants and was soon to be thrown in at the deep end!

The NCPTF was running a 48-hour global live operation where law enforcement from all around the world could submit cases of missing and exploited children that they needed assistance with. I was put forward as the facial comparison expert, the in-house Super Recogniser. Police Departments from around the globe flooded my inbox with requests to confirm or rule out identifications on numerous images of missing children. I worked through the night for two days and made a number of identifications. I was able to quickly rule out an image or give law enforcement a positive lead. Either way, their job was sped up immensely and I did prevent some cases from going in the wrong direction.

I spoke later at the NCPTF’s national convention where I discovered that during that 48-hour exercise, I was the most requested expert in my field - another win for the Super Recognisers.

Kevin Metcalf, at the time CEO of the NCPTF and now with the MVP Task Force

I was lucky enough to meet up with Kevin Metcalf, intercepting him on one of his trips to the UK. Kevin is a force to be reckoned with and has moved on to a new role at the MVP Task Force, working in the field and making a difference to so many.

To this day, I continue to work with the task force. My most satisfying case to date was identifying online images of a perpetrator and two child kidnap victims. My identifications were given to law enforcement, who were able to locate and arrest the perpetrator and rescue the children within 6 hours of me picking out their images.

You can find out more about the important, challenging work the NCPTF does here: https://ncptf.org/