St. Pete is a major player in the fight against human trafficking

In the spring of 2009, detective Jeremy Lewis attended a weeklong, state-sponsored training in human trafficking at St. Pete College’s Allstate Center. A homicide investigator with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, Lewis had dealt with pimps and prostitutes, sexual deviates and a lifetime’s worth of ugly crimes against children and other innocents. But human trafficking was something of an unknown concept for the street-smart Clearwater native.

“I was like ‘This doesn’t happen in Clearwater,’” Lewis recalls thinking to himself. “‘It’s one of the top ten beaches in the world! It doesn’t happen under my nose.’

“Two weeks later, I had a victim of sexual battery come to me for an interview, to start the investigation. And essentially everything I’d learned in that training two weeks prior, she pretty much laid it out alphabetically for me. Some of the stuff was very unique to what I had just been taught.”

Jeremy Lewis had been introduced to human trafficking, a $150 billion, global industry, according to the International Labor Organization. It is contemporary slavery – perpetrators use violence, threats, deception, debt bondage and other manipulative tactics to force people to engage in commercial sex or to provide labor or services against their will. The victim can be woman, man … or child.

In the summer of 2009, Detective Jeremy Lewis’s case burst wide open, “with multiple victims and multiple arrests that spanned six or seven states. That opened my eyes.”

Within the year, Lewis and Detective James E. McBride of the Clearwater Police Department – with whom Lewis had been working the case – had formed the International Association of Human Trafficking Investigators (IAHTI). Eventually, they both retired from law enforcement.

Based in St. Petersburg, the 501©3 nonprofit is globally recognized today as an important resource in the ongoing fight against both sex and labor slavery.

“We educate law enforcement and prosecutors on how to identify human trafficking, on how to conduct the investigations, and then how to conduct successful prosecutions,” explains Lewis, the organization’s president (McBride is vice president).

“In addition to that, we work with the community, we work with faith-based organizations, we work with different civic groups, women’s groups, men’s groups – they’re called Non-Governmental Organizations, or NGOs.”

NGOs, Lewis explains, “are a valuable asset. Because once they’re educated, they go out there and actually help conduct community presentations. The next thing you know, they’re out there holding their own trainings, and training more people.

“They can help identify potential victims. And they can also help law enforcement provide assistance to victims subsequent to their rescue.”

One of the most effective tools in the IAHTI arsenal is the Members Forum, which allows investigators and law enforcement from different states and different agencies to share information and assistance, any hour of the day. “Typically, when a case happens, it happens after hours on a weekend,” says Lewis. “Most of these cases don’t happen Monday through Friday between 8:30 and 5.”

The organization shares office space with Callyo, the St. Pete-based firm that creates communications technology for law enforcement. “We’re able to tell them ‘This is what we’re seeing; this is one of the obstacles we’re having in a case.’ They have the knowledge. They have the geniuses putting the technology together, and we have the working knowledge and the issues that we’re facing daily, coming from our members around the country and around the world.”

IAHTI holds training and information conferences twice a year. “At our most recent conference, we had people from seven different countries, including Canada, Mexico, Bahamas … pretty much everybody surrounding the United States,” Lewis says. “It’s very prevalent.”

So prevalent that it’s not limited or defined by sex, race, age, ethnicity or sociology. “We’ve had cases and case studies from rural America, from small towns that might have three to four law enforcement officers to cities that have 10,000 law enforcement officers in them,” Lewis explains.

“We need to continue educating the community on what it is, how to identify it and who to report it to. So that law enforcement can go out there and rescue these victims and put the traffickers in prison.”

A few facts (provided by the Polaris Project)

• The International Labour Organization estimates that there are 40.3 million victims of human trafficking globally.
  • 81 percent of them are trapped in forced labor.
  • 25 percent of them are children.
  • 75 percent are women and girls.
• The International Labor Organization estimates that forced labor and human trafficking is a $150 billion industry worldwide.
• The U.S. Department of Labor has identified 139 goods from 75 countries made by forced and child labor.
• In 2016, an estimated 1 out of 6 endangered runaways reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were likely child sex trafficking victims.
  • Of those, 86 percent were in the care of social services or foster care when they ran.
• There is no official estimate of the total number of human trafficking victims in the U.S. Polaris estimates that the total number of victims nationally reaches into the hundreds of thousands when estimates of both adults and minors and sex trafficking and labor trafficking are aggregated.