Task Forces and Training

The old bull and the?young bull?were standing at the top of the hill overlooking a field of many gorgeous young heifers. The young bull said, "Let's?charge down?the hill, knock over that fence and service one of those heifers each". The old bull wisely replied, "Why don't we saunter down the hill, open the gate, take a sip at the water trough and then service ALL of those heifers?"

As Alison and I travel around the county training officers, we see many jurisdictions setting up human trafficking task forces, which is needed and a great thing, but these task forces by themselves will not move the needle to stop human trafficking.?Training together with the task forces is what will do that.?The task forces are the young bull and quality skills based human trafficking training is the old bull.?

Human trafficking investigations can come from a variety of sources including the National Human Trafficking hotline, tips from, citizens, hotels, casinos, truck stops, advocates, hospitals, and other law enforcement agencies.?Since only 4% of law enforcement agencies in America have full time human trafficking investigative units, the task force concept fills the roll of detectives that will handle these types of investigations.?The task force can also implement proactive operations that will help identify victims and traffickers.?The drawback of the task force is that there is a small number of detectives assigned to these task forces and they are only operating 8 hours a day, 5 days per week.?They may also be responsible for a large area, in some cases an entire city, county, or even a state.?This means they are limited in the number of victims and traffickers they can identify during proactive operations, and they are limited in the number of investigations they can handle.?

So how do we tip the scales in our favor.?The answer is we train all patrol officers.?Patrol officers make up the bulk of law enforcement officers in America and they are on the streets 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days per year.?They respond to the disturbance calls, overdoses, attempted suicides, they interact with persons involved in commercial sex, all forms of citizens and persons involved in criminal activity.?While a task force detective may be the tip of the spear, the patrol officers is the actual spear.?They are the eyes and ears of the police agency and generally know the individuals and what is going on in their individual patrol area.?Unfortunately, only 17% of law enforcement officers in America are trained in human trafficking and this does not consider awareness training vs skills-based training.?While I have not seen research on this difference, in my experiences only about half of this 17% is skills based, meaning about 8.5% of officers have the training they need to interdict, identify, and investigate human trafficking.?If we were to train all our law enforcement in human trafficking interdiction skills, we would move the needle tremendously in our country.?Alison and I kept records of law enforcement trainings and saw that as training of patrol officers increased the number of incidents and victims identified also increased. For example, in a sample group of 1,500 officers who had no training, this group identified 0 human trafficking incidents and 0 human trafficking victims in the previous 12 months.?As this group began receiving training, the numbers began to rise until within 3 years this same group of officers had identified 385 incidents and 47 possible victims in a 12-month period. ??The only thing that had changed was the training.?We have seen this pattern remain consistent no matter the state or jurisdiction.?Upon receiving proper training, officers begin identifying victims and traffickers, time after time, after time.?

We could do the same thing in terms of medical personnel.?Research shows that 88% of trafficking victims utilize the medical system while being trafficked and yet only 4% are identified.?Just like with law enforcement this is due to a lack of training.?One metropolitan hospital averaged identifying between 0-2 juveniles per year prior to developing a screening tool and providing training to their employees.?Once these processes were in place the numbers began to rise year after year to within 6 years, they identified 105 juveniles in one year that were possibly being trafficked and or exploited. Nothing else had changed, except they now had proper training.?All these cases would then flow to the task force for investigation.?

I see posts of LinkedIn about things that need to be done in the human trafficking arena.?For example, I saw a post yesterday that we needed legislation to help victims remove arrests from their records while they were being trafficked.?While I agree with this, proper training makes this moot going forward. ?As officers are properly trained, they realize that these persons are victims and need to be provided services and not arrested, hence there are no criminal convictions to get removed going forward.?I have seen similar posts about helping victims who were brought to the United States illegally to be trafficked.?Same thing, once properly trained, officers will understand they are victims and work to help them with services and their immigration status, meaning we no longer need to waste time with lawyers, the courts and everything else to fix these issues.?

The answer is that we clearly need both task forces and training.?Training is the foundation, and the task force is the roof.?We need the roof to keep the house dry and secure, but without the foundation, the roof has nothing to support it.?So why then do we concentrate on task forces instead of training.?First, setting up and doing training is not as sexy as setting up a task force.?The task force is much more fun, we get to play cops and robbers and that is certainly more fun than setting up trainings or even sitting in a classroom.?Secondly, there are very few trainings that are skills based and not awareness training.?Awareness training does not provide law enforcement what they need.?While awareness is good, without the development of proper skills, like a screening process, interview skills, evidence collection and other things, law enforcement will not be effective.?Lastly, funding is always an issue.?Most law enforcement agencies do not have funding to train all their officers in human trafficking, so a mechanism needs to be in place to offer it at no cost.?This usually means private funding sources.?There are indeed grants and other government funding sources, but most of them are so slow moving and have so many restrictions, to get large groups of officers trained would take years, maybe decades.?Alison and I hope to train 4,000 officers this year via private funding which provides the training at no cost for the agencies, but this is not always easy and takes the support of many different groups and individuals.?

Bottom line is that if we want to move the needle, we need training and task forces.?We need to be the old wise bull, walk slowly, and build the foundation that will help hundreds and thousands of victims across the country.?We just must decide to BE THE ONE!