Battle continues against sex trafficking of minors in U.S.

grandmother, who immediately told him the girl might have been in prostitution since she was 15. Trained in interview techniques for such situations, and experienced at noticing people who somehow do not belong together, Otto correctly suspected DMST — domestic minor sex trafficking.

Trooper Mitch Jergenson, 46, stopped a car driven by a man whose passenger was a 17-yearold girl he had gotten to know via Facebook and other social media. He had paid for her ticket from California to Phoenix and was taking her to Las Vegas. She said she was going to be a “model,” then said she was going to work in a strip club. This, says Jergenson, is “the start of a process” whereby minors often wind up working the streets.

Sgt. Scott Reutter, 47, who watches the motels near the Phoenix intersection of I-17 and I-10, where prostitutes are active, approached a young girl talking to an older man. She said she was 22. Reutter, whose daughters are 22 and 19, thought she was “14, maybe 15.” She had been a runaway for 17 months, since she was 13, and said that if she were returned to the custody of child services she would run again. After a 10-minute hearing, she was returned. She immediately ran, and did so repeatedly. To be in law enforcement is often to feel condemned to bailing an ocean with a thimble.

Frank Milstead, too, knows how Sisyphus felt. When nature designed him, it had a director of the Department of Public Safety in mind. Large and laconic, he is the 54-yearold son of a Phoenix cop and he knows in the marrow of his bones that “there are so many people out there who want to take advantage of other people.”

It is unclear how many victims of DMST there are because for many reasons the crime is not often reported by its victims. They are, Milstead says, usually abducted, sort of, from “some environment where nobody missed them,” adding, however, that traffickers cannot control “people who are unwilling.”

The website Backpage, whose founders live in Arizona, began as a place for normal classified advertising but, a U.S. Senate investigation concluded, found its most lucrative business being a sexual marketplace. The New York Times reports that law enforcement officials say Backpage’s “dating section” often “used teasers like ‘Amber alert’ and ‘Lolita’ to signal that children were for sale.”

Holding up his smartphone, Milstead, whose vocation reinforces his inclination to look on the dark side, says: “Leaving your kid alone at night in his room with this? You might as well leave him or her in the city park downtown. Anything is available on a phone.”