{"id":333490,"date":"2025-10-26T09:06:53","date_gmt":"2025-10-26T09:06:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/333490\/"},"modified":"2025-10-26T09:06:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-26T09:06:53","slug":"los-angeless-notorious-sex-trafficking-corridor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/333490\/","title":{"rendered":"Los Angeles\u2019s Notorious Sex Trafficking Corridor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"css-8hvvyd\">EMILY: [00:00:00] I\u2019m at the edge of what\u2019s known in LA as the Blade. EMILY: It\u2019s one of the most notorious sex trafficking\u2026 corridors in the United States. [00:00:07][6.8] It\u2019s a three and a half mile long stretch of figure A corridor. There are churches and schools, but there are also girls as young as 11 forced to solicit customers for sex. EMILY: late at night, you\u2019ll start to see lots of fancy cars pull up. Girls are coming out of vans, out of cars.\/\/they\u2019re trying to meet the quotas of their traffickers. Some of the busiest institutions on The Blade are motels where the girls are being held\u2026there are smoke shops that are really tailoring to the trade. EMILY: I\u2019ve been following this issue for two and a half years. I\u2019ve spoken to the mayor, the city attorney, law enforcement. Everyone seems to know this issue is going on. So why is it so hard to get to the root of the problem? (The LAPD\u2019s 77th division) covers the northern half of the Blade\u2026 This vice squad has identified hundreds of suspected traffickers on the blade. But even when officers are confident that someone is a child sex trafficker, they need to collect enormous amounts of evidence in order to arrest them and then prosecute them in court. They often rely on rescuing these juvenile girls, in part to help them escape, but also to gather intelligence about their traffickers. OFFICER LEE: Today we\u2019ll be doing a juvenile C Sec minor rescue operation starting at 1900. EMILY: [00:00:54] The plan for tonight is to go out with undercover operators who are going to try to pose as customers and pick these girls up OFFICER LEE: Anyone that is youthful in appearance and is confirmed to be a streetwalking prostitute will be detained pending a human trafficking investigation and brought back here to 77 station\u2026. EMILY: [00:01:51] On this particular street in Los Angeles, prostitution itself has always been a problem. But there have been a few factors in recent years that have led to the uptick in trafficking of juveniles. [00:02:02][11.1] EMILY: [00:02:02] One of the reasons for that was in 2020, when the pandemic occurred. Lots of children were out of school, they were spending more time online on social media, which is where a lot of sex traffickers recruit children. [00:02:14][12.5] Gangs began to recognize these girls as a major source of revenue on the Blade. OFFICER Navarro: after 2020, you see such an influx of women. It\u2019s a lot of money out here. These gang members noticed that. Do you sell one rack of cocaine, one baggie of meth at a time? Female can be resold again and again, multiple times. If you have one girl, you can easily make $1,200 a day easily. And the females are very, very reluctant to turn them in, sometimes out of fear, sometimes because they\u2019ve been manipulated to think that, oh, this is my boyfriend, or he actually cares for me. Then unfortunately, a lot of these guys want younger looking females. But as this crisis has grown, the officers say that the resources to fight it have not kept up. LAPD\u2019s Central Human Trafficking Unit has been disbanded, which means that vice units like the one at 77th Street Division are having to carve out the time for this on their own. This sergeant asked us not to show his face because he\u2019s working undercover. OFFICER GARCIA: [01:26:13]one of the biggest challenges we have is\/how many officers it takes to just investigate one female, all the moving parts, it\u2019s time consuming so it\u2019s real overwhelming Five years ago, it was illegal to loiter for the purpose of prostitution. So officers were able to pull up to a corner and apprehend a whole group of girls hoping to recover minors among them. But a 2022 bill repealed that law out of concern that it was leading to racial profiling of black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. Now officers have to pursue girls one at a time. That requires methodical undercover operations. EMILY: [00:01:05] One of the undercover officers has identified a juvenile on social media who\u2019s planning to meet up with him for sex. They\u2019re hoping to arrange a pickup for that girl. [00:01:14][8.6] OFFICER GARCIA: [00:02:32] The agreement was to meet at 10 o\u2019clock at this location. The goal is to have somebody watching every p oint of the intersection when she arrives. [00:02:54][22.9 OFFICER Navarro: [00:03:10] We have a possible juvenile detained. [00:03:17][6.8] OFFICER Navarro: [00:03:17] She told him how she\u2019s gonna be dressed and sure enough you see her walking up, matching the description, It turns out she\u2019s fourteen. [00:03:26][9.8]\/\/ The girl is temporarily handcuffed, but she\u2019s not being arrested. This is what the squad calls a juvie rescue operation. OFFICER Navarro: they\u2019re gonna call children\u2019s services and she\u2019ll be taken to get medically screened and then placement for her. And they\u2019re gonna make contact with the parents. I don\u2019t know if they\u2019ll return her to them. \/\/She\u2019s very young. Hopefully we caught her soon enough the reality is that three out of four girls who are rescued from the blade tend to go back to their trafficker. Sound up: Vice squad EMILY: [00:04:34] When juvenile girls are brought into the station, they\u2019re not booked for the crime of prostitution. They\u2019re brought into a completely different area that officers and volunteers have tried to make very comfortable. The girl was successfully apprehended. So law enforcement considers this a successful operation. But the reality is that three out of four girls who are rescued from the blade tend to go back to their trafficker. Tonight operation lasted almost seven hours, but they weren\u2019t able to catch and arrest any traffickers tonight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EMILY: [00:00:00] I\u2019m at the edge of what\u2019s known in LA as the Blade. EMILY: It\u2019s one of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":333491,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,245,9621,2961,224,5337,165322,12650],"class_list":{"0":"post-333490","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-children","11":"tag-human-trafficking","12":"tag-la","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-losangeles","15":"tag-prostitutionsex-workers","16":"tag-rape"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115439681169004314","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}