Assistant prosecutor who helped launch Bergen Cyber Crimes Unit retires after 25 years

After what started as his desire to try to make the world a better place, Chief Assistant Prosecutor Brian Sinclair leaves the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office after 25 years of dedicated service.

Sinclair spent most of his time at the Prosecutor's Office as the chief of the Cyber Crimes Unit, which he helped found while John Molinelli was the prosecutor.

He joined the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office in 1999 after graduating from Seton Hall Law School in 1998 and clerking for two Essex County judges. He worked to prosecute several crimes, such as burglaries and drug offenses.

"I was always interested in trying to make things better, trying to fix one problem at a time," Sinclair said. "Being a lawyer, and specifically a prosecutor, allowed to me just fix one thing at a time, one victim, solve one case. It just always felt like the right thing to do."

Molinelli approached Sinclair and Sinclair's lieutenant in 2004 to create the computer crimes unit after he noticed how good he was with computers. There were only two years after the establishment of the unit, between 2017 and 2018, when Sinclair wasn't the chief. During those two years, he ran the internal affairs department.

Sinclair said he has always loved technology and found it fascinating. He said he was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to help start the unit.

"When ... Molinelli asked me to work in this particular unit, I got the chance to not just take care of that interest in helping people and fixing things, but to do it with cybercrime," Sinclair said, noting that not many people were doing so at the time.

He said it was fascinating to put together how it would all work.

Cybercrimes come with a lot of difficulties, Sinclair said. In the beginning, some of them included convincing judges that searching on an electronic device was no different from searching a safe or a box of documents.

Now rapidly changing technologies present a huge challenge in the effort to apprehend suspects, especially those who commit internet sex crimes. In his time with the unit, Sinclair handled over 500 internet sex offender cases. But because technology has been so prevalent in everyday life, the Cyber Crimes Unit's lab is used for every crime.

When beginning in the Cyber Crimes Unit, Sinclair said, he expected to work a lot of hacking and ransomware cases but found that it was predominantly pedophile cases.

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He said many cases at the start were men assuming they were chatting with children in chat rooms to try to meet up for sexual relations. But as technology changed, it became more and more difficult, because sending a proof of life photo was no longer enough.

"They wanted to FaceTime. That posed huge challenges for us," Sinclair said.

The Cyber Crimes Unit has constantly had to adapt its strategies as technology advances, as young people's lexicons change and as more and more apps with encryptions and deleting data have been put on the market. Sinclair gave credit to the Prosecutor's Office and the Bergen County executive for their willingness to fund the cybercrimes lab, which is essential to building their cases.

One of Sinclair's biggest frustrations has been the inability to get into a device that is locked by a password or biometrics. He said having a search warrant is no guarantee officials can get into a device.

Sinclair said he has been proud of the education he has provided not only to parents but also to children, warning them of the dangers on the internet and social media.

He said working at the Prosecutor's Office has been wonderful and that he had the opportunity to work with many impressive law enforcement officers. Sinclair said he has been able to witness officers saving children because they noticed something was off online.

"I feel blessed to have really loved my job," Sinclair said. "And it's hard to leave. I love working for the county. I always hoped that I was fair to my victims and my defendants."

Even though he has left the Cyber Crimes Unit behind, Sinclair will still be working with technology, finding a new home in cybersecurity. Not content to wait around, he starts his new job on March 4.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Bergen County NJ assistant prosecutor retires after 25 years