Guest commentary: Human trafficking (sex and labor)

Human trafficking - Photo by Imagens Evangélicas

Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery in which traffickers use force, fraud, or coercion to control victims for the purpose of engaging in commercial sex acts or labor services against his/her will.

Sex trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purposes of a commercial sex act, in which the commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such an act has not attained 18 years of age, (22 USC § 7102). Sex trafficking has been found in a wide variety of venues within the sex industry, including residential brothels, escort services, fake massage businesses, strip clubs, and street prostitution.

Labor trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purposes of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery, (22 USC § 7102). Labor trafficking has been found in diverse labor settings including, domestic work, small businesses, large farms, and factories.

Traffickers use violence, threats, blackmail, false promises, deception, manipulation, and debt bondage to trap vulnerable individuals in horrific situations.

For more information, please call the National Human Trafficking Resource Center: 1(888)373-7888.

Today's guest commentary comes to us from Ricardo Moore, who represents the Warrendale and surrounding neighborhoods on the Detroit Police Commission.

Police Make Arrests in the Back Page Murder Case

The police made a pair of arrests recently in BackPage.com murder case. This case involved a series of murders involving women connected to a web site that various escorts used to find new clients.

I congratulate each of the officers who were involved in this investigation.

Detroit Has A Serial Killer

Detroit has many problems, but it would appear that we can now add one more to the mix. There is a serial killer operating in the east side of the city; one who targets female escorts that he meets through an internet ad service, BackPage.com.

Police Chief Ralph Godbee said in a statement that he is stopping short of calling this a serial killing spree. However, since a serial killer is generally defined as someone who kills two or more victims in two or more separate incidents, and since we now have at least four victims within a week, I believe its safe to refer to this individual as a serial killer.

Since its no secret that the investigative resources of the Detroit Police Department have been strained from  attempts by Chief Godbee and Mayor Dave Bing to preserve the high ratio of police officers assigned to politically desirable administrative positions, I certainly hope that they do not compound this error by hesitating to call in state and federal agencies for assistance with this. Stopping the Back Page Killer is simply too high of an importance for us not to take this seriously and bring every resource to bear.

Mail Bag: Warrendale Community Organization

In response to my comments about prostitution in the Warrendale neighborhood, an anonymous reader wrote in to say:

the warrendale community org has to start putting it in high gear..thats the only hope for warrendale...we need a neighborhood news letter to go out to every address..and we need the business community to sponser that...the city and police are not going to help....what happened to the cool "warrendale banners"..on the light posts?...no money?...well start raising the money..get the word out..go door to door...the servive drives look like crap..why doesnt the warrendale org send out their own letters to the houses and business.....why isnt channel 2,4 and 7 contacted to do a "feelgood story"..on a neighborhood struggling?......if the president can dupe the country into spending 2 billion$ a day in iraq...than we can get the residents in warrendale to support....some nice banners and other landscaping....

I agree that the Warrendale Community Organ- ization has the potential to do a lot of great things for our neighbor- hood. The problem, however, is that out of a neighborhood with 9,036 homes there is usually only a dozen or so people who show up at their meetings. In fact, when the WCO did a clean-up of the Southfield Freeway service drive last May, there were more people who came to help out from Macomb County then there were from the Warrendale neighborhood.

Think about that one: folks in Macomb County have absolutely nothing to gain from seeing a portion of the Warrendale neighborhood cleaned up, but there were still more of them helping out than there were folks who live right by it. This is in spite of the fact that flyers were hand-delivered to everyone who lives along the service drive and it was announced repeatedly including on this blog.

Now it's a New Year.

A chance for a gigantic "do-over."

A time to move beyond blaming others.

A time when folks make resolutions and (hopefully) keep them.

With that in mind, please allow me to say this. There won't be a WCO meeting in February because of scheduling problems. The next one will be on Monday, March 5 at 7 p.m. in the Activities Building of Sts. Peter & Paul Church.

I invite and encourage everyone in the neighborhood to stop by. I also invite the dozen or so people who have emailed me privately to say that they used to live in Warrendale and wish us the best to stop by as well. Your input and involvement is welcome even if you no longer call the Warrendale neighborhood home.

If you work the afternoon or evening shift somewhere and can't make it to the meeting, I invite you to send me an email (frank.nemecek [at] gmail.com) and I'll see if I can find a way to get involved that meets your schedule.