LAPD Arrests Potential Sex Trafficking Victims

At Club 907,  an L.A. "hostess club," men pay thirty bucks an hour for the "companionship" of immigrant women — many of whom, it appears, have been illegally trafficked here for forced labor and sex work.

In a recent raid of Club 907, a clear brothel front, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) busted in on suspicion of shady behavior. Of the 88 arrested that night, 81 of them were women — 59 of whom were arrested for possessing false identification (ie, for being undocumented).

Never mind the clear evidence of prositution at Club 907, or the cocaine and unauthorized booze the LAPD seized — all the patrons were told simply to go home. While the LAPD insists that it was targeting the club management's illegal behavior, the arrests alone show that this move was little more than a thinly-veiled immigration raid.

For Club 907 reopened asap, soliciting more dancers on Craigslist four days after the raid. LAPD focused, instead, on the "illegalities" of 59 women whose profiles are as classic victim-of-human-trafficking as they come.  LAPD even arrested a 17-year-old girl who'd been reported missing for months. Nice one, LAPD.

The U.S. government provides legal protection and support to victims of human trafficking.  As you can read about widely on Change.org's Human Trafficking cause, people are trafficked like goods with a price tag across international borders — often for forced labor or the sex trade at places like Club 907. But LAPD turned their heads on the warning signs and, in some if not all arrests, criminalized the victims.

While the LAPD joined a task force in 2005 to better understand and mitigate the problems of human trafficking, they clearly need to be doing better. Human Trafficking is often so hidden underground that it is elusive and victims are hard to rescue — but Club 907 couldn't have been a more textbook case of human trafficking risk.

Sign this petition to demand that LAPD further investigate the potential trafficking of arrestees from Club 907, and that from here on out they require police officers to attend extensive training on human trafficking risks. That way that they can target the criminals instead of the victims.

Photo Credit: Steve Weaver