Alani I. Bankhead

2004 to 2013

She was commissioned in May 2004 through Air Force ROTC at The Pennsylvania State University and entered active duty that July. Her early career was in personnel and readiness at Lajes Field in the Azores, followed by section command at Tinker Air Force Base.

In 2008 she cross-trained into Special Investigations, completing the Criminal Investigator Training Program and the Basic Special Investigators Course, and served as an OSI operations officer at Misawa Air Base, Japan, where she was one of the Air Force's first agents trained for Internet Crimes Against Children task force work. While at Misawa, she deployed with Special Operations to neutralize Al Qaeda leaders.

She then led the counter-intelligence team within AFOSI Research, Development and Acquisition in Quantico, Virginia, stopping spies and terrorists from getting access to our most classified research and technologies.

2013 to 2016

She then commanded an OSI detachment in Kuwait, and later served as the senior bodyguard and Security Advisor to the Secretary of the Air Force.

Special agents spend much of their careers out of uniform.

Deployed commanders take a turn serving the holiday meal. It is a small, standing tradition, but it's the small gestures that matter, and Alani always shows up for her people.

2016 to 2026

Upon entering the Reserves, Alani also began her civilian career. These civilian positions are captured separately from her military service record, and are detailed further down on the page.

In 2016 she moved from active duty to the Air Force Reserve as an Individual Mobilization Augmentee (IMA), filling specialized roles inside active-duty units and major commands. She served as the IMA to the Commander of MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, responsible for providing investigative and counter-intelligence services to SOCOM and CENTCOM.

In 2022 she moved to AFOSI Headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, as the IMA to the Assistant Director and Special Agent in Charge, overseeing 60 investigators drawn from seventeen law enforcement agencies working child exploitation cases.

Her career closed as the IMA to the Commander of the 7th Field Investigations Squadron at Joint Base Andrews, the Office of Special Investigations' National Capital Region command, which supports Headquarters Air Force, the Space Force, the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

During her service, Lt Col Bankhead accumulated four years and five months of foreign service. She earned an Iraq Campaign Medal with service star, 5 Meritorious Service Medals, 2 Air and Space Commendation Medals, Joint Service Achievement Medal, 3 Air and Space Achievement Medals, Meritorious Unit Award, Air and Space Organizational Excellence Award, National Defense Service Medal, Global War On Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, 2 Air and Space Overseas Service Ribbons Short, Air and Space Overseas Service Ribbon Long, 5 Air and Space Longevity Service Awards, 2 Small Arms Expert Marksmanship Ribbons, and Air and Space Training Ribbon. She also completed Air War College.

These are Lt Col Bankhead's DD-214s, released by her. Personal identifiers such as Social Security number, date of birth, and home address are covered. Nothing about her service, rank, assignments, or decorations is withheld.

A DD-214 is a federal form, built as a government record predominantly for service benefits rather than for public consumption. This means that they aren't always the easiest to read. Someone who serves only on active duty gets one when they leave, covering that whole period. A reservist's records are not handled the same way: each deployment or mobilization is a separate period of service, and each one ends with its own DD-214. Each is accurate, but each shows only its own slice. That is why we've included two forms here. The first is from when she transitioned from active duty to the Reserve, and the second is from when she retired.

We're also including a couple of her decoration citations, written and signed by the commander who approved the award, as well as a letter of appreciation from a partner police agency overseas.

Upon entering the Reserves, Alani also began her civilian career. These civilian positions are captured separately from her military service record.

From September 2016 to November 2017 she was International Director of Investigations and Law Enforcement Development for Latin America at the International Justice Mission (IJM), the world's largest anti-slavery organization—a nonprofit whose teams investigate slavery, child sexual assault and the commercial sexual exploitation of children, and work with host nation governments to prosecute offenders and support survivors. Her work there focused on child sexual abuse and child sex trafficking.

In April 2018 she joined the State of Hawaii Department of the Attorney General as a special agent in its Internet Crimes Against Children unit, later serving as alternate commander, through December 2021. She took the task force training she had done in the Air Force and put it to work standing up Hawaii's ICAC operation, which had been struggling to recruit and hold investigators. She was also the unit's electronic detection K9 handler, working with a dog trained to find concealed digital storage devices during search warrants.

The Hawaii ICAC Task Force ran the first Operation Keiki Shield on Oahu in March 2019—an operation to identify, locate and arrest offenders who commit internet-facilitated sexual crimes against children, and to identify and rescue child victims of child sexual exploitation and abuse. In the Attorney General's announcement that November, the operations had involved 95 law enforcement officers and professional staff from more than a dozen county, state, federal and military agencies, and produced 25 arrests across the first three operations. Alani continued to run these operations until her departure in December 2021. The recognition below covers Keiki Shield I through XI, March 2019 to December 2021. The program is still running: its twenty-ninth operation was announced in November 2025.

During this time she also created Operation Shine the Light with the Attorney General's Missing Child Center, a recurring, multi-agency initiative on Oʻahu aimed at locating and recovering endangered missing children and runaways who are at high risk of exploitation, abuse, and human trafficking. The first operation ran in October 2020 and recovered five children from the foster care system. Since then the initiative has recovered 64 children across the island.

Kevin K. Takata spent thirty-three years as a prosecutor in Hawaii, including as chief of the Criminal Justice Division in the Hawaii Attorney General's office. He hired Alani into the state's Internet Crimes Against Children unit in 2018. He wrote this in March 2023, and it is published here with his permission.

March 29, 2023

Letter of Recommendation

Re: Alani Bankhead, Special Agent Par Excellence

Aloha:

During my thirty-three year career as a prosecutor in Hawaii, I worked with a multitude of federal, state and local law enforcement personnel who ranged from the leaders of their agencies or departments, to seasoned investigators, to recently hired officers, in my roles as a member of a homicide team (I'm credited with the most homicide convictions in Hawaii), chief of the felony trials division in the Honolulu prosecutors' office, first deputy in the Kauai prosecutors' office, and chief of the Criminal Justice Division in the Hawaii Attorney General's office. One person distinguished herself from the rest with her relentless pursuit of those who preyed on children, passion to serve her community and country, and ability to organize and execute undercover operations. That person is Alani Bankhead.

We first met in 2018 to discuss her interest in a special agent position with the Internet Crimes Against Children (“ICAC”) unit. At that time, ICAC was performing poorly and was having difficulty recruiting and retaining investigators, in part due to having to deal with the horrendous child pornography images possessed and distributed by suspects. Ms. Bankhead impressed me with her desire to handle these difficult investigations, and more.

I hired her and it turned out to be one of the best decisions I made during my career. Ms. Bankhead revitalized the ICAC unit. She was the heart and soul behind a still ongoing series of undercover operations that involved law enforcement officers posing as adolescents online to entice pedophiles to make contact and meet. She arranged to train the officers, and planned, participated in and helped supervise the operations.

Training, organizing and supervising undercover operations involving federal, state and local law enforcement personnel with the attendant egos is never easy, but Ms. Bankhead was able to get the different personalities and agencies to work together. Everything from officer safety, logistics (e.g., securing a house to meet the suspects at, setting up a command center, food for the participants, evidence collection, etc.), and legal issues were addressed. It is a testament to Ms. Bankhead's leadership that most of suspects who were arrested pled guilty even while facing lengthy prison terms.

The undercover operations were expanded from Honolulu to other Hawaiian islands (Hawaii island, Kauai and Maui) and Guam, where it met with equal success. During the operations, child sex abuse and human trafficking victims were identified and rescued. The Hawaii Legislature must have been impressed because for the first time Hawaii's ICAC unit received state funding and didn't have to rely exclusively on federal dollars.

If that wasn't enough, Ms. Bankhead secured an electronic detection dog for Hawaii (aka “Lulu”) who is trained to sniff out digital storage devices that are used to store child pornography. Lulu and Ms. Bankhead were an inseparable team that were called upon for search warrant executions and prison searches. Lulu soon became a celebrity for her work and has been honored from Honolulu to Washington, D.C.

Ms. Bankhead is dedicated to protecting the vulnerable, investigating criminal activity and thereby preserving the rule of law. She has a proven ability to work with people of disparate backgrounds for a common good. And, most importantly, she is passionate in all she does.

It was my good fortune that our paths crossed for she was instrumental in improving the Hawaii ICAC unit and the lives of children in Hawaii.

Yours truly,

Kevin K. Takata

Retired

Kaleilani Grant is Assistant Coordinator of the Missing Child Center Hawaii at the Hawaii Department of the Attorney General, where she has served since 2018. She is a Native Hawaiian survivor of sex trafficking, a recipient of the U.S. Department of Justice Child Protection Award, and attended the 2023 State of the Union as the guest of U.S. Senator Mazie Hirono. She and Alani worked in neighbouring units at the Attorney General's office.

If you need help, or you know something

If someone is in immediate danger, call 911.

If you or someone you know has information about missing children or child exploitation, or if you or someone you know is being abused, trafficked, exploited, or is otherwise unsafe, whether a child or an adult, report it to your local police or use the lines below. They are free, confidential, and staffed around the clock.

• National Center for Missing & Exploited Children 1-800-THE-LOST (1-800-843-5678) · CyberTipline
• National Human Trafficking Hotline 1-888-373-7888 · text 233733
• National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-7233 · text START to 88788
• Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline 1-800-422-4453
• RAINN, sexual assault 1-800-656-4673 · adults and children
• Eldercare Locator, older and vulnerable adults 1-800-677-1116 · connects to local Adult Protective Services
• 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline call or text 988