Officials Urging Public to Keep Watch for Trafficking
As part of an annual campaign, Nebraska officials are urging the public to remain vigilant and watch for signs of human trafficking.
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts recently issued a proclamation calling for trafficking awareness across the state. January is National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.
“Here in Nebraska, we tend not to think about (human trafficking),” Ricketts said during a Jan. 11 news conference. “But it really is a modern-day form of slavery, and in Nebraska, we may not consider that we are a traffic corridor.”
The governor praised past legislative efforts that made punishments for trafficking charges harsher in the state.
“There were a number of different efforts through the legislature to be able to strengthen our laws against human trafficking to really help us with that crackdown,” Ricketts said. Those laws have resulted in a sharp uptick in trafficking prosecutions in Nebraska.
After only a handful of prosecutions between the years of 2006 and 2016, more than 20 people faced human trafficking charge in 2020 alone, according to a report from the Attorney General’s Human Trafficking Task Force. (Find the report at omahadailyrecord.com.)
An increase in prosecutions may seem surprising given that most major events in Omaha, such as the College World Series or Berkshire Hathaway weekend, can drive an uptick in trafficking, but those events were canceled or greatly reduced last year because of the pandemic. The cancellation of events nationwide pushed traffickers to adapt to working online, as many office workers and others have done in recent months.
FBI Supervisory Special Agent John Hallock, the leader of FBI Omaha’s Violent Crimes Against Children and Human Trafficking squad, told The Daily Record in an interview that these online operations come in all shapes and sizes.
“Most of these cases are going to be online. It’s going to be some type of online meet, it’s going to involve some sort of grooming between the predator and the victim, and eventually physical contact will occur,” Hallock said.
Traffickers use just about any social media platform that they can to identify and contact victims, Hallock said. He advises that the most prominent misconception is about the way that some perceive how people are recruited into sex or labor trafficking.
“It’s not like we have victims being grabbed—adult or juvenile—off the street and taken away and used for trafficking,” Hallock said. “That is a myth. That does not occur.”
Generally, Hallock advises watching for and immediately reporting abnormal behavior, such as someone meeting someone in a mall or parking lot on an ongoing basis.
For juvenile cases, he recommends that parents look for signs of grooming or unknown older individuals trying to get in contact with their children by looking through their phones and having conversations about meeting up with people they met online.
“When it comes to human trafficking dealing with juveniles, we want to make sure that the parents are constantly looking at the cellphones,” he said. “Usually, parents are paying for that cellphone, so they should be looking at the child’s cellphone to see if there’s anything on there that’s not normal patterns.”
If you or someone you know is a victim of human trafficking, call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 or text 233733.
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