Local Law Enforcement Responsibilities
You have a critical role in helping to identify victims of human trafficking and prosecuting their traffickers – the real criminals.
It’s important that you keep doing what you’re doing. As local law enforcement officers, you are most often the first responder or the first to encounter individuals at the scene of a crime, making your role in identifying victims and perpetrators is key to building a case.
Go to crime scenes, question potential perpetrators and potential victims, assess crime scenes and collect evidence. But when you do all of these things, take a closer look, beneath the surface. What you think you’re looking at may in fact be a crime scene involving victims of human trafficking. Remember, the next prostitute, stripper runaway youth or illegal immigrant you take into custody could be a victim of human trafficking.
As mentioned earlier, there are other crimes committed by traffickers that may also be prosecuted at the state level such as violent crimes of murder, kidnapping, battery, assault, sexual battery and false imprisonment.
Most often it is local law enforcement personnel who initially encounter victims of trafficking out in the field. A successful policing strategy on the local level will incorporate cooperation with Federal authorities in the investigation and prosecution of human trafficking and will coordinate efforts with local social service providers to meet the immediate needs of the trafficking victims.
If you think you have come in contact with a potential victim of human trafficking, you should call 1.888.3737.888, the Trafficking Information and Referral Hotline, to further assist any victims you identify and to find out how helping those victims can help you build your case to prosecute and convict their traffickers. For more information on human trafficking visit www.acf.hhs.gov/trafficking.