Thread: Florida City wins grant on human trafficking

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/10/04/North ... n_hu.shtml

City wins grant on human trafficking
The $450,000 federal outlay, the only one awarded in Florida, will set up a task force to fight exploitation for the sex industry and slavery.
By JACOB H. FRIES
Published October 4, 2006

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CLEARWATER - The city Police Department on Tuesday won a $450,000 federal grant to create a local task force devoted to rescuing victims of human trafficking and arresting their smugglers.

Part of the money will pay for two full-time detectives to investigate such cases over the next three years. Clearwater was one of 10 police agencies nationwide to receive the grant this year, and the only one in Florida.

"Without this money, we would never be able to do this right," said Dewey Williams, the deputy police chief. "These are not your typical, mainstream criminal investigations. It's not like robberies or rapes, where victims report the crimes. Victims of human trafficking have to be sought out. We have to go out and find them."

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced the Justice Department grants Tuesday at a national conference on human trafficking in New Orleans.

In addition to Clearwater police, the task force will include representatives of the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney's Office, the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office and the Regional Community Policing Institute.

World Relief, a Christian aid organization with a local office at 6219 U.S. 19 in New Port Richey, will receive an additional $450,000 to help rescued victims, who often need temporary visas, housing and other support as the cases wind through the court system.

"When you rescue these victims, they have nothing," said Williams, who was attending the conference in New Orleans.

Trafficking in people is not the same as smuggling them. Human smugglers are typically paid to take people illegally across international borders, leaving them alone once they do so.

Traffickers, meanwhile, may transport people across borders, but they generate their profits through exploitation, coercing their victims into slavery, involuntary servitude or the commercial sex industry.

After drug dealing, human trafficking is tied with illegal arms sales as the second-largest criminal industry in the world, according to the Health and Human Services Department.

Florida ranks as the No. 2 destination for trafficking victims, behind California, with both states being home to large immigrant populations, says the Florida Coalition Against Human Trafficking.

The scope of human trafficking in Clearwater and the Tampa Bay area is unclear, but it's definitely "alive and well," Williams has said.

In May, when police raided a brothel on Camellia Drive, just north of Gulf-to-Bay Boulevard, they found signs of human trafficking, officials have said. A woman found at the house was not held against her will, but evidence and testimony from a doorman suggested that other prostitutes brought there had been lured from Mexico and forced into the sex industry, police say.

It was not the first time city police officials thought they had encountered a tentacle of human trafficking. In 2003, they shut down a prostitution operation at an apartment near Drew Street and U.S. 19 - similar to the one on Camellia Drive - but investigators couldn't tie it to a trafficking network.

In Clearwater's grant application, the department noted the success of its Hispanic Outreach Center, which opened in 2001. However, workers at the center had encountered several suspected cases of human trafficking, but because of a lack of resources, police were unable to effectively investigate, the application said.

That's going to change, Williams said.

"Beginning next week, the task force is going to be under way," he said.

The city Police Department on Tuesday won a $450,000 federal grant to create a local task force devoted to rescuing victims of human trafficking and arresting their smugglers.

And then make them honorary CITIZENS gratis of the American people's coffers. Way to go! Another excuse to suck in the Illegals.

Hey, Alberto......you're on top of it, AG. You sure know how to work for Americans.