Eighty-five percent of the arrests made by Portland Police Bureau’s Human Trafficking Unit result in only a solicitation charge. Last month, we talked to reporter Karina Brown about her investigation into how these arrests are affecting sex workers. Today, Lieutenant Franz Schoening of the Human Trafficking Unit responds.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with a follow-up to a recent conversation. Last week, we talked to Karina Brown, a reporter for Courthouse News. She had written an article for Willamette Week that focused on one particular sting set up by the Portland Police Bureau. She used that sting to talk more broadly about the bureau’s approach to sex work and human trafficking. Today we’re going to hear a response from Portland police. Franz Schoening is a lieutenant with the Human Trafficking Unit and he joins me now. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Franz Schoening: Hey, thanks Dave.
Miller: How would you describe your unit’s focus?
Schoening: Well, if you don’t mind, I’d like to start with a quick disclaimer. [In] the Human Trafficking Unit, we really stress taking a victim-centered and trauma-formed approach to human trafficking, which includes sex trafficking. So, I’d be remiss to say that we can represent the voices of victims and survivors of sex trafficking. So, for a really full picture on this very complex issue, I’d suggest also reaching out to community service providers and organizations that represent victims and survivors of sex trafficking to get their perspective on what is really an incredibly complex story.
Miller: I appreciate that and we have talked to victims and survivors before. We wanted to have you on to talk about the enforcement piece. But I appreciate where you started. So, how would you describe the focus of your unit and your unit’s work?
Schoening: The Human Trafficking Unit focuses on really a couple different things. One is the investigation of felony sex and labor trafficking cases. And as part of that, engaging the use of in-house victim advocates to provide resources for victims of trafficking and also partnering with community-based service providers on that end as well. And then the second part, particularly addressing the issue of sex trafficking, we do investigations and enforcement on the demand side of prostitution and sex work, using what the Willamette Week article referred to as a sting, but we call them buyer suppression missions.
Miller: I’m curious about numbers; according to public records done by Willamette Week, you’ve arrested about 100 people in stings or buyer.. you said buyer suppression activities?
Schoening: Correct.
Miller: About 100 people have been arrested in the last 22 months in those. Eighty-five percent of those arrests ended up in a commercial sexual solicitation charge, a misdemeanor. In that time, how many people have you arrested for sex trafficking?
Schoening: The numbers show, not a lot. And so I’d say that data is imperfect, particularly around sex trafficking. You can look nationally and internationally. Professionals, academics, people who research sex trafficking really struggle with the data piece. That trickles all the way down to the police bureau’s efforts to capture data on sex trafficking and even when it comes to our enforcement efforts around sex trafficking. So, correct, the numbers show a lot more arrests for solicitation of prostitution or sex services. That’s reflective of a couple of things. One is, as we focus our efforts on both investigating felony trafficking and coercing people into this work, and we also try to focus resources on the demand side as well; the reality is, on the demand side, soliciting is a misdemeanor offense. And when we focus our efforts there, we tend to generate a lot of arrests on cases that are fairly simple compared to the complex felony level investigations of trafficking. So the numbers aren’t gonna reflect an even balance there. Even though the efforts are spread broadly and equally, the numbers aren’t gonna reflect that. The other piece is--
Miller: If I could just stop you there,
Schoening: Sure. Sure.
Miller: Because that last sentence seems like a crucial one. You’re saying that your unit spends as much human time, as much energy and resources, on the trafficking side as you do on the buyer suppression side?
Schoening: I would say we focus more of our efforts on the trafficking side.
Miller: So what do those efforts look like? Because, as we heard last week, and we read, some of us, in the article in the Willamette Week, we get a sense for how you set up a sting. It seems relatively easy. You can just put ads that wait for men, in general, to respond to them and you can arrest them at a motel. How does your work to actually go after traffickers themselves, what does that look like?
Schoening: So it takes a couple of different looks at it. One side is, we do also organize missions where we try to contact people who are posting services, where they’re selling sex services online on a variety of social media platforms. Those are platforms we’ve found that both women who are being coerced and women who are consensually engaging in this work post ads on these social media platforms. We do that for a couple of reasons. One, we want to try and contact underage children who are being coerced into this work and we also want to have contact with adult women who potentially are being coerced in this work. So we run missions to that effect. And for those missions, generally when we have contact with the women who show up to engage in this work, we’re really doing that to focus our efforts, again, to determine whether or not they’re being coerced into this work and then also to link them up with social service providers, our in-house advocates. So they have services that, if they are being coerced into the work, we can work with them to hold their trafficker accountable. Or, if they’re simply engaged in this work because they don’t have another viable alternative, we can hook them up with services where they do offer ways out of this work. And that’s just a voluntary thing on their part; they’re not required to participate in that. It’s something they have as an option for them. The second piece is, when we get referrals from, wherever, in the community -- whether it’s another law enforcement agency, a victim of trafficking calls us directly to report a crime or it’s the national hotline telling us there’s a trafficking case that they’ve become aware of -- we have detectives that are assigned to those cases and work and reach out to contact the victim’s with our advocates and do follow-up investigations on those trafficking reports.
Miller: I want to play you a short excerpt from Karina Brown, the reporter we talked to last week, to get your take. Here she is.
“… police, when they set up these stings, they have no idea who these people who are responding to their ads are. And the people responding aren’t responding to anything that makes it sound like a forced situation or an underage situation. So they’re just catching this broad swath of people who might otherwise be clients for sex workers who are doing their jobs voluntarily.”
Miller: Lieutenant Schoening, she went on to say, the key complaint that she brought up from sex workers who say they are not coerced into their work, is that these stings end up hurting them by scaring away their, quote-unquote, “good clients” and forcing them to have a likelier chance of running into clients who might be violent. What’s your response to that critique?
Schoening: I can’t say that’s not a valid perspective from their point of view. I would say that the Human Trafficking Unit really tries to engage in harm reduction across the board. A lot of that is focused on victims of sex trafficking. There are certainly studies out there that talk about places where this work has been decriminalized or legalized and sex workers who engage in that work consensually do report feeling safer. But I’ll say that, when we’re doing these missions, the buyer suppression missions, you can flip that argument around: that the men who are seeking out these sexual services, they have no idea if the women they’re contacting, to purchase services from, are being coerced, if they are under age. So really there’s a risk on both sides of potentially capturing consensual adults, or at least initially contacting consensual adults, who would otherwise make contact. But again, when we contact women who are consensually engaging in this work, we are not citing them or arresting them. And when we contact the men who are engaged in this work, the vast majority of the men who are cited or arrested for soliciting end up being eligible for a diversion program where they simply have to go to a class where they’re educated about the potential issues around sex trafficking. And it’s more of an education component; it’s more restorative justice. And they have the opportunity to do that and then move on with their life.
Miller: Do you have data about what happens to those men, how often they go on to get new solicitation charges?
Schoening: I don’t. I can look into that. Generally speaking, in conversations I’ve had with the service provider who puts those classes on and our folks who work in this field, we have a very low recidivism rate. But I can try to find numbers for you.
Miller: What’s your overall understanding -- based on the different kinds of operations that you’re doing right now -- your best understanding of the percentage of people who are doing sex work truly voluntarily and those who are being coerced in some way, whether they are minors or adults?
Schoening: That’s a really complex question that doesn’t have a neat answer that I can give you. I mean, the issue of consent is a very gray area. There are certainly women who are being forced through physical violence and coercion to engage in this work. There are women that we’ve contacted, who have experienced domestic violence dynamics with the person who’s trafficking them. They would tell you they’re not being necessarily coerced in the moment, but we’ve had contact with those same women a year or two or three years later, where they, looking back, have said, “You know what? I was coerced” because of these other power dynamics that exist. And there are women who are engaged in this work because they have addiction issues or mental health issues. So again, our approach when we contact those women is, regardless of where they’re at on that spectrum of willingness and consent, if they want to pursue charges against the person trafficking them, we offer that to them. If they simply want to engage in services to help with whatever other issues they’ve got, we offer that. And if they don’t want to participate at all, we respect that and we let them carry on with their life.
Miller: I want to run one more thing by you. This is a tweet that was written by Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty. She wrote this after the Willamette Week article came out. She wrote, “I don’t believe stings to catch consenting adults engaged in sex is a good use of limited public safety resources. Portlanders are deeply concerned about gun violence, robberies, traffic violence and a host of far more serious issues. PPB should match the community’s priorities.” What’s your response?
Schoening: My response is I think that we can always improve on our communication and our education to the community about why we do the things we do. That’s a start. There’s been a lot of studies around sex work, the legalization or decriminalization of sex work. But generally what the studies have shown is that, as the market increases for sex work, you’re going to have an increase in the number of women being trafficked as well. So part of our efforts to reduce the harm to women who are being trafficked is to reduce the demand for sex services. That’s done through buyer suppression missions. So, yes, the Police Bureau doesn’t have enough resources to do all the things we want to do. But I don’t think it’s an argument that there’s a certain class of victim that doesn’t deserve service from the Police Bureau. To try to compare a victim of sex trafficking, who’s experienced some of the most horrific and intimate violence that you could experience as a human being, to the victim of gun violence, in my opinion, is inappropriate. The Police Bureau tries to reduce harm across the board and this is an area that still deserves resources, in my opinion.
Miller: Franz Schoening, thanks very much for your time today. I appreciate it. That’s Franz Schoening a lieutenant in the Portland Police Bureau’s Human Trafficking Unit.
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