AG quiets Cowboys crowd

Former Texas Lawyer art department staffer Steven Phelps thought he was experiencing some sort of a workplace flashback at the Cowboys-Redskins game last weekend at Texas Stadium. There, splashed across the Jumbotron screen during the pre-game festivities was Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott. No, Abbott wasn’t busting America’s team, he was out on the field to announce that he was handing out thousands of free flash drives to interested families, says AG spokesman Charles Castillo. The drives come tricked out with special child-identification software to enable parents to readily access critical information – think recent photos and identifying details -- needed by authorities in the event a child goes missing. Assisting Abbott in the mass hand-out were investigators with the Texas Office of the Attorney General’s Cyber Crimes Unit, which in 2006 received a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention to establish an Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, according to the AG’s office. The flash drives were developed by Family Trusted Child ID and sponsored by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Phelps, who is a parent, did not pick up one of the drives, but be did listen quietly and politely to the AG’s message -- along with everyone else he observed. “Everyone was polite, there was no reaction,” Phelps says. “No one applauded.” Phelps speculates that the crowd may have been taking a break after cheering wildly for the folks who preceded Abbott on the mic, a U.S. veteran of the Iraqi war who presented the team with an American flag that had flown over the wartorn country. After Abbott finished speaking, Phelps says the AG “watched the Cowboys cheerleaders.”

-- Jenny B. Davis