Task force seeks end to human trafficking

Years ago, a young woman jumped out the window of a car during a police stop in New Haven.

She was the victim of human trafficking trying to escape her trafficker, Ronald Perry came to learn. And the New Haven Police detective sergeant tried his best to keep track of her, connect her with resources and collect her story.

But now, so long after, Perry remembers his helplessness, a sad and frustrating realization that there were too few resources and too many roadblocks to rescue a vulnerable victim and stop her exploiters, he recounted during the state’s first meeting Tuesday of a

new task force to combat human trafficking at illicit massage businesses.

“It was right under people’s noses,” said Perry, who retired from the police force and works as an anti-trafficking consultant. “Everyone comes in contact with a survivor and doesn’t even know it.”

The state’s new task force is now trying to develop recommendations for the legislature to fight the problem hiding in plain sight: in towns across Connecticut, illicit massage parlors that force trafficked women to perform sex services operate, while law enforcement and state and local officials struggle to curb these criminal acts.

The task force was formed after a Hearst Connecticut Media investigation published in February used police records, expert interviews and the sex review board website Rub Maps to document the prevalence of illicit massage parlors that continue to persist even under the scrutiny of state and local officials.

“There are over 9,000 U.S. illicit massage businesses happening,” said Robert Beiser, strategic initiatives director of sex trafficking at Polaris. “It’s happening in every community around the country, and certainly Connecticut is an example.”

While strides have been made in recent years, panelists Tuesday indicated there’s a long way to go, highlighting a patchwork of local laws insufficient to deal with a multistate and international problem, poor data collection, handicapping language barriers, and a lack of awareness by the public.

Officer Courtney Desilet of the East Hartford

Police described how illicit massage parlors may be routinely shut down temporarily by police and local code officials, but reopen under new names with the same management and staff, or hop the town line into a new municipalities with less stringent massage regulations in order to keep operating. Cases often involve players in multiple states and sometimes international actors, necessitating partnerships with federal law enforcement.

“We also have websites such as Rub Maps and that organization is operating in a foreignbased country,” said Desilet. “They’re not complying with U.S. search warrants or subpoenas so we’re limited in what we can get for information in terms of taking enforcement action and sometimes the perpetrators are not even in the United States... they’re fully taking advantage of that. That is something where we could really benefit from legislation.”

Rep. Jillian Gilchrest, D-West Hartford, who chairs the task force with Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven, suggested they might consider recommending criminal or civil penalties for landlords who rent or lease property to individuals they know are facilitating human trafficking or prostitution on those grounds.

Polaris research has found that shutting down illicit massage businesses sometimes has negative impacts on victims and effective strategies often involved amping up victim support services in communities, Beiser said.

Police say they often do not have resources to enforce the laws currently on the books and complete robust trafficking investigations — that takes money, but also access to translators to accompany officers on the job and win the trust of victims, many whom have immigrated from other countries and are not proficient in English, Desilet said.

In 2016, the General Assembly passed legislation adding a fee to the penalties for the crimes of patronizing a prostitute, permitting prostitution or promoting prostitution. The money from these fees is supposed to be used to support human trafficking investigations.

In fiscal year 2017, the first year for which data is available, 27 people were found guilty of these crimes, according to the state Trafficking in Persons Council. In only six of those cases the fine was assessed however. The state could have collected $127,000, the Council found. Instead, it collected $5,600.

“We have not seen an uptick in collection,” Steven Hernandez, executive director of the state’s Commission on Women, Children, Seniors, Equity and Opportunity, said Tuesday. “The trajectory of convictions need to matched with the conviction that we are going to do this and the conviction that it really matters.”

Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, D-New Haven, in February called on prosecutors in Connecticut to impose the fine more often.

The state’s Trafficking in Persons Council has attempted to gather uniform police data on human trafficking referrals, missing children and other data points related to trafficking for several years, but it has struggled to create the mechanism for submitting these reports and win widespread cooperation from police departments. In 2018, just 55 of 101 police departments submitted information and in 2019, the council lost the data in an email problem and was unable to publish it publicly.

In 2020, data will be skewed by the pandemic and police officers’ inability to do many proactive inspections and other actions for health reasons, Desilet said.