Focus on sex slave trade

ROCCO PARASCANDOLA
NewsDay
August 7, 2006

It wasn't all that long ago that the NYPD's global efforts involved little more than the occasional overseas phone call: "Hey, we think so and so's over there. He killed his wife. Can you pick him up for us?"

Sept. 11 changed all that. And it's about to change some more, with the NYPD close to announcing the formation of the Human Trafficking Unit to focus on the sex slave trade, according to NYPD sources and others briefed on the matter.

"Girls from all over the world are being forced into this. It makes you sick," says a police source familiar with the plan. "It's a major problem."

A similar unit was formed by the NYPD three years ago. It worked closely with human rights groups and focused primarily on cases in Asian immigrant communities. After a short while, however, the unit was scaled back amid suggestions within the NYPD that it wasn't necessary.

That suggestion, of course, was off base, as more and more women were being trafficked into the United States to work as prostitutes.

Many women are lured here under the ruse that there is legitimate work for them. But instead of cleaning houses or working in a nail salon, they wind up massaging men and having sex with them. If they don't comply, harm is promised their families back home.

Concrete numbers of sex trafficking case are difficult to come by. The federal government, however, suspects up to 17,000 sex slaves are trafficked into America each year. No one seems sure how many wind up in New York City.

The NYPD, sources say, is going to try to find out.

Its new unit, funded with federal monies, will be announced in upcoming weeks. It will work closely with federal authorities and agencies that provide social services for victims. It may also investigate cases involving forced labor and interstate human trafficking.

The new unit, sources say, is in some ways a move away from traditional policing.

For years, police responded to prostitution complaints from New Yorkers who had to walk past them on their way home. A number of quality-of-life initiatives pushed the majority of street prostitution indoors, and the police responded by doing more undercover stings and looking to the Internet for clues.

The thinking now is that women arrested for prostitution, particularly those from other countries, are going to be treated as victims once it becomes clear they are sex slaves. The hope is that they will be coaxed into cooperating.

"We're not talking about the oldest profession in the world," says City Councilman John Liu. "This is not a profession. It's servitude."

Liu's district covers Flushing, a neighborhood with a stubborn brothel problem. But sex slavery is far from a problem limited to any one area in the city or any one foreign country.

Last month, three immigrants from the former Soviet Union were arrested by police for allegedly forcing women to work as prostitutes in Elmhurst and Corona.

In May, the traffic came from south of the border, with 66 arrested by federal agents for smuggling Mexicans here so they could work as prostitutes.

A month before, two brothers from Mexico were hit with 50-year federal prison sentences after pleading guilty to a number of sex trafficking and immigrant smuggling offenses.

But authorities still don't have full grasp of the issue.

Fourteen states have human trafficking laws. New York isn't one of them. Without such a law, the city will have a difficult time nailing anyone for anything more than promoting prostitution.

Major cases could be handed over to the feds, but the U.S. attorney's office is not likely to take on the smaller cases, according to Jane Manning, project officer for Equality Now, an international women's rights group that has been pushing for state human trafficking laws.

A state law is only common sense, because it's local street cops, not FBI agents, who are most attuned to what's going on here and in other cities.

But politics and common sense don't necessarily mix.

A bill to fight sex trafficking was introduced last year by Bronx Assemb. Jeffrey Dinowitz. The bill, which would have established two new crimes, trafficking a person for sexual servitude and trafficking a person for labor servitude, had plenty of support. The Senate, though, offered up its own bill.

By the time Assembly and the Senate adjourned last month there had been plenty of bombast - but no state trafficking law.