Over the years, I have marveled at how much federal grant money for law enforcemt has gone to waste. Many police agencies have obtained sophisticated equipment which ended up gathering dust because no one ever learned how to actually use it. Hick police departments obtained machine guns for every officer as well as other military-style weapons for use against a massive terrorist attack which was never going to occur in their jurisdictions. And how about those military tanks many law enforcement agencies bought?
Now the Las Vegas Sun has exposed the waste of millions of dollars in grants that were designed to root out human trafficking. To begin with, those grants were based on a problem which was greatly exaggerated, the same as with many other grants. And agencies that received those grants, as well as grants for other policing purposes, have been unable to account for how the money was spent. Here is the eye-opening report from today's Sun:
LAS VEGAS SUN
PROBLEM ONCE THOUGHT DIRE HASN'T BEEN CONFIRMED
Millions spent to fight human trafficking; few examples found
By Timothy Pratt
December 8, 2008
It sounded like a script of an international spy thriller: lies, border-crossings, violence, sex.
Except Metro Police Sgt. Gil Shannon was describing the scene he and his officers encountered at dozens of Las Vegas Valley massage parlors every week: women speaking foreign languages, bags barely unpacked, practically imprisoned.
It was nothing less than "sex slavery."
The audience of academics, police, lawyers and social workers gathered at UNLV listened intently as Shannon spoke about human trafficking, a scourge that was doubtless spreading across the valley. The theory, said Shannon and others, was simple: with sex for sale on the streets of Las Vegas, bad guys around the world must be bringing women here with lies or against their will to meet the demand. All the people sitting there had to do was work together to bust the traffickers and rescue the victims.
The date was Sept. 19, 2003.
Within two years, the federal government delivered more than a million dollars to help search for trafficking victims in the region. The fight was a top priority of the Bush administration, which would pour more than $150 million into similar efforts nationwide.
Today, however, despite the time and money invested, Southern Nevada is no closer to understanding the problem — or more important, even proving that there is a problem, say top officials at Metro Police and at the Salvation Army. The two agencies are the main players on a task force funded by most of the federal money.
No traffickers have been caught.
The number of victims has barely reached double digits.
What’s more, the Health and Human Services Department, one source of the federal money, has no records of the results of its grants and the other federal agency funding the effort, the Justice Department, would not provide records to the Las Vegas Sun.
Similar outcomes have been seen nationwide, with few victims and fewer traffickers identified since Congress passed a law to attack the problem in 2000. That law laid out conditions for the "T" visa, which gives trafficking victims the right to live in the United States.
As of November, only 1,318 such visas had been granted nationwide.
Federal estimates of the number of victims have ranged from 14,500 a year up to 50,000, the number cited in the 2000 law.
Sharon Neville is a lawyer with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles who was at the 2003 UNLV meeting. She trains attorneys and workers for nonprofit groups on the issue nationwide. Neville said she has stopped citing government estimates because she doesn’t think they’re reliable, and instead quotes the number of visas issued — "that’s the only thing you can point to."
As for the results seen so far in Las Vegas and elsewhere, she doesn’t think it’s a sign that there is no problem, but rather that the federal money is being poorly spent. Task forces and other projects overlook basic but vital assets such as people who speak the language and understand the culture of the victims. She also thinks there has been a tendency to focus on trafficking for sex, ignoring large numbers of victims brought into the country to work in such industries as farming.
"Unfortunately, if you’re looking for headlines, sex trafficking sells," she said.
Lt. Raymond Steiber, who in May became the point man at Metro Police for a $492,000 Justice Department grant on human trafficking, acknowledged that the August 2006 grant had not led to the prosecution of a single trafficker. He also said he did not have information readily available on how many victims the task force had helped.
"We really don’t know if there’s a problem, or how big it is," Steiber said. But he cautioned that the absence of data should not be read as an indication the problem does not exist.
Steiber said the first year-plus of the grant suffered from a lack of organization, with little understanding about the different roles of policing, social services and immigration law.
Protocols are now in place, with Metro at the helm and other agencies providing support.
The Justice Department also gave $450,000 to the Salvation Army of Clark County in late 2006.
Maj. William Raihl, coordinator of the Salvation Army, said 12 people have been identified as victims of trafficking and are seeking permission to stay in the United States.
"If you look at the number of victims we’ve helped, we’re falling short," he said. "That’s been the most disappointing thing."
In 2005 and 2006, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department awarded $150,000 to WestCare, another local nonprofit, to find and help trafficking victims. The plan was to troll streets and massage parlors for women brought from foreign countries by deception or against their will. But social workers at the agency ran across few trafficking victims, instead finding that at least 90 percent of the women had other troubles, such as being underage runaways.
At the time, Metro Police Capt. Terry Lesney said she was "looking for that perfect test case, to set a precedent ... like a minor who comes here thinking she’s going to be a star and then she’s forced into prostitution."
That case never came.
Attorney David Thronson, one of the founders of UNLV’s immigration law clinic, was tapped to provide legal assistance to victims in the Metro-led task force. But in April 2007, when the task force faced its first big test, Thronson found he was left out of the loop.
A two-year federal and local investigation had uncovered a prostitution ring involving seven men and about 25 women, mostly from Asia. The idea was to interview the women, determine where they were from and whether they were brought here by deception or against their will. They were to be advised of the protections available to them under federal law.
But Thronson learned about the case from a newspaper. By the time he contacted Metro and the Salvation Army, most of the women had been let go.
The attorney said the case showed the task force "had a lot of room for improvement." He hopes Steiber’s efforts to get agencies on the same page will yield better results.
Thronson also wonders whether the lack of results so far reflects a tendency to focus too much on sex. The few trafficking cases he knew of to date mostly involved men and women brought to Las Vegas to work in other areas, including housekeeping.
Thronson said more effort should be made to gain the trust of potential victims, because many have not only been deceived, but also brutalized physically and psychologically.
Raihl, of the Salvation Army, said finding and helping victims has been more difficult than he thought. Obtaining the "T" visa alone takes up to a year, Raihl said, though he was told going into the grant that the process would take less than six months.
Turnover on the task force has made the job even harder, he added. Both Metro and the Salvation Army are on their second director, the person who handles day-to-day work.
Under the terms of its grant, the Salvation Army cannot help victims obtain government services once the federal government determines they have been trafficked into the country. Raihl said he was confused about whom to "hand off" clients to once they reach that point.
The federal government has given about $8.5 million since 2006 for such services to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The conference contracts with local agencies. But only $9,000 has come into Las Vegas so far, according to Nyssa Mestas, associate director for anti-trafficking in migration and refugee services at the conference.
Mestas said she couldn’t reveal how many victims had been helped with that money, but it was "a very small number."
"I’m going, ‘Where are the cases?’ I don’t know what’s going on in Vegas," she said from her Washington office.
Mestas said recently she has been unable to find a Southern Nevada agency to work with.
But, she said, the valley’s task force isn’t the only one to take some time getting off the ground. It’s a problem she attributes to different worldviews of law enforcement and social service providers.
As for the Washington agencies with their hands on the purse strings, the attitude seems to be one of detached patience when it comes to the meager results from Southern Nevada.
Justice Department officials said reports on the local task force’s performance were not available without a Freedom of Information Act request.
Joye Frost, with the department’s office for victims of crime, said both the issue and the task forces need more time. "It’s an emerging issue ... and just giving folks money doesn’t mean there’s an expertise," she said.
Arne Owens, spokesman at Health and Human Services, said "there are no reports that can provide any information on outcomes" from grants to Las Vegas, adding that any money spent helping victims is "wisely spent."
The Department of Justice grants are set to expire in August.
Thronson noted that if Las Vegas is a target for traffickers, as federal and local officials have claimed, then, "we reach one of two conclusions: Either the numbers are wrong or we’ve reached a crisis and we’re not doing anything to effectively address it.
"The truth is probably somewhere in between."
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