 My name is Jessica Wong and I will be your host for today. In this episode, we are going to be talking about human trafficking and the effects it has on the community, specifically Yolo County. Here with me, I have Jennifer Davis, who is an investigator with the Yolo County District Attorney's Office, specializing in human trafficking. And I also have Jeff Fryzik, who is our Yolo County District Attorney. Good afternoon. Hello. Welcome. Thank you. I wanted to start off this conversation by first asking, what is human trafficking and just a couple of general points around that? So I'll take that to start. Human trafficking really is a modern-day slavery, is one way to look at it. It's the deprivation of personal liberty for the purposes of either sex trafficking or labor trafficking. And those are both problems here in Yolo County. They're problems throughout California. But that's really the simplest way to explain it. And these are both cases that we will investigate here in Yolo County. But currently, most of our cases in Yolo County involved sex trafficking of both adults and juveniles. Okay. So what is Yolo County doing to address these type of issues? I'll start and then I'll pass it off. So Yolo County has actually taken a very aggressive role in going after human trafficking specifically the traffickers. And what we have is in Yolo County, we've got the strong support of the Yolo County Board of Supervisors and they have created a human trafficking investigator. That's investigator Davis. And they've also put their support behind our prosecution unit. We have a specially trained prosecutor in Yolo County that does nothing but human trafficking cases as a specialty. But what we're doing is we are collaborating. These cases are all about collaboration when it comes to the investigation and the prosecution of human trafficking. So also in Yolo County we have created a law enforcement work group. In 2015, there was a steering committee that was created with that memorandum of understanding. And basically child welfare services, probation, law enforcement and the district attorney's office all came together. Along with our community-based partners and realized that this is something that we need to tackle as a community of agencies. And so the memorandum of understanding has been signed by all of our different departments to work together and like Mr. Isaac said here, collaborate on these cases because they're very serious cases that we want to handle in an appropriate way. Along with the memorandum of understanding, we have the steering committee so we meet all of us to come together and determine the best way to handle the cases and collaborate. Our law enforcement partners, we don't have a task force officially, but we have a what we call our human trafficking law enforcement work group. It's made up of myself, our detectives from our major agencies including West Sacramento, the Yolo County Sheriff's Department, Woodland Police Department, Davis Police Department and Winners Police Department. We meet once a month, we talk about case trends and our cases that we're handling and we work to actively investigate them all together. Which is really important in dealing with these issues and we take a victim-centered approach with our victims as well. In addition to our work group meetings, we also do proactive investigations where we have prosecutions that come out of those. And so our proactive investigations are undercover operations that we've done together. That is either targeting the victims, so we try to recover victims in undercover operations and then arrest the exploiters. In addition to that, in October of this year, along with the Woodland Police Department, our agency participated in a John Sting, which is targeted at the sex purchasers. So we conducted an undercover operation with that. We had residents of Yolo County and residents in surrounding counties contact our undercover officers and attempt to basically purchase sex. So in that operation, we were able to make arrests and those cases are currently going through our office for prosecution. So like I said, we're always collaborating amongst our agencies to work together to handle these crimes. Yeah, well thank you for that explanation. So Jeff has mentioned and I also touched on that you are the human trafficking investigator. So what is your role in these type of cases? Typically, I kind of wear a few different hats. I act as a liaison on a daily basis between our law enforcement agencies, the district attorney's office and child welfare services and probation. So we get a lot of referrals and phone calls from all of those agencies, not necessarily saying that there's a victim disclosing, but definite concerns. So it's the commercially sexually exploited children that we are most concerned about and either they're disclosed victims or they're those that just based on different aspects of what's going on in their life, they're very high risk for being trafficked. So in addition to that, I carry a caseload. One of my main roles is to interview the victims. Because of my background, I will be asked to contact our victims, youth or adults, and I'll conduct either initial interviews or even follow-up interviews. And because of what these victims have been through, it's not just one interview, it's sometimes it takes multiple interviews just to determine kind of what they've been experiencing and what trauma they've been exposed to. So I'll do those victim interviews and I also work in collaboration with our multi-disciplinary interview center as part of the district attorney's office. Those are our forensically trained interviewers who interview children of all kinds of sexual abuse or physical abuse. So we work very closely with them to collaborate on our interviews together. Also, we do a lot of community outreach, myself and advocates from Empower Yolo who are specially trained on anti-trafficking. We do community presentations anytime that we're asked. So we've presented to educators, medical staff, anyone in the community. If they want to know more about human trafficking, then we will put together a community presentation and go talk to them. And then I help our attorneys with trial preparation as a traditional district attorney investigator. That's the main role is to provide support for a deputy district attorney in preparing for trial, doing follow-up, collecting evidence, reviewing evidence, and basically preparing for the whole court process. So I kind of do it all a little bit. Yeah, it sounds like that. So how do these types of situations get reported? Is it through 911 or what kind of outlets are used? Our victims, because of the complicated dynamics, don't call 911 very often, right? No. It's very rare if we have a case come in that way. So the majority way that we get our cases is from working with Child Welfare Services, both Yolo County and surrounding agencies. And they'll call in with concerns and we'll kind of go from there and conduct an investigation. We also, just to jump in, we do get referrals from our own prosecutors and investigators when they are reviewing other types of cases. So a lot of times in domestic violence cases, there will be indicators, perhaps, that somebody is a victim of human trafficking. And so what we've done is we've trained our prosecutors. We've trained a lot of them, our investigators. And we've trained other police officers in the county on what to look for. And when they see those indicators, they'll call us and then we'll start to look at that. Yeah, definitely. We get a lot of referrals that way. And are there any referrals that you get where somebody comes up to you and tells you? No, not usually. It could be a patrol call for service for law enforcement. They may get a call at a motel or something not quite right and now that they have this training, they'll look a little bit further into something. A lot of our cases actually come from our habitual runaways. So we have our missing persons, our youth who are reported runaways and it's not just you have to consider who are they running to potentially, are they running to an exploiter? Are they leaving their family potentially to go be trafficked and then they come back home? So that's definitely an indicator sometimes and that's how we'll get some of our cases. Probation and our juvenile hall in Yolo County are great about contacting me and making a referral that way as well. I wanted to touch a little bit about the demographics of human trafficking. You guys mentioned earlier that you guys see adults in juveniles. Can you expand on that? I can touch on that and it's really people are surprised in Yolo County when they hear these statistics because it is a problem that's happening right here. It's happening in Davis, Woodland, West Sacramento, all of our major jurisdictions have examples of human trafficking and most typically they involve juveniles. So these are children that are being trafficked into the sex industry. An interesting statistic is that statewide about 70% of the victims that are being trafficked are born in the United States but in Yolo County it's 100% of the victims that are being trafficked in Yolo County or at least that we're contacting and working with in Yolo County are born here in the United States. So these are our kids that are being trafficked and there's a lot of misconceptions around that. Yolo County is set right between two major interstates, Interstate 80 and Interstate I-5 and that creates a haven, frankly, for traffickers to take our kids and to move our kids into other locations and also to bring other victims of human trafficking here. Thank you for letting us know that. That's really mind-blowing. It's another stat for you and this is surprising but we're averaging about two to three referrals a month and these are cases involving children who are being trafficked and these two to three referrals a month are coming from every city in Yolo County so Davis, Woodland, West Sacramento and other parts of the county. So it's much more significant than people realize and it's one of those things where people often say to me well isn't this an issue in other places where they're bringing kids here? No, it's actually there are kids from right here that are being lured into this industry by these predators and then trafficked. Wow. Yeah, absolutely. So what are some of these challenges or what types of challenges do you guys encounter when handling situations like this? I would say these cases are really challenging for many different reasons. The victims in these cases whether they're adults or minors are not often times willing to come forward as a victim for a lot of different reasons, past abuse, current abuse, potentially threats from their exploiter and they're also told not to talk to law enforcement. They're very reluctant to talk to law enforcement because the exploiter has told them not to do that and maybe in the past that they've had a reason not to come forward to law enforcement for other things as well. So as far as contacting victims, you know, once we're able to build a rapport with them in a victim-centered approach we can't make them speak, right? We can't make them disclose. So even if we believe that they have information to share, it ultimately has to be up to them and this can be a process over time where we meet with them and offer services and our Empower YOLO advocates come out with us or victim services of our YOLO County District Attorney's office come out and build the rapport, build that relationship, get an initial disclosure perhaps and then it can take several interviews, several hours worth of interviews to then actually get a disclosure where law enforcement can follow up as far as case goes and sometimes we get that and sometimes we don't but then also as law enforcement we rely on digital evidence so it's going through cell phones, social media accounts just all kinds of other evidence that we may come across in these cases that can also help with if we get a disclosure or depending on the other aspects of the case and jurisdiction too is definitely a challenge. Yeah, jurisdiction is a challenge in these cases because they are moving the predators that are trafficking these victims move them all over the state, all over the region and there's a couple of reasons for that. One they are moving them so that the victim is more isolated so if you have a victim from right here in YOLO County that victim may be being moved to the Bay Area down south and even across state lines it's not uncommon so that isolates the victim it makes it harder for him or her to connect with family, with friends and it also makes it more difficult for law enforcement to pursue these offenders when they're moving these victims from city to city and even across state lines it's really difficult for local law enforcement to continuously pursue because of our limited resources but that's one of the reasons why our human trafficking collaboration and our specialist in YOLO County is so important because we don't stop pursuing them and again it's all about collaboration and working with local law enforcement across the country and that's what we're doing. And I just wanted to quickly touch on this last subject before we wrap up but what are some of the indicators of human trafficking and what can people do if they suspect it? Sure, a lot of indicators you have to consider the totality of the circumstance right? So a huge red flag for people to notice potentially is a youth who runs away very often they may go for a couple days and come back and not explain where they've been it could be youth who potentially attend school semi-regularly but either they're constantly coming late maybe a parent doesn't realize that they're skipping the first part of school and they're running off to an exploiter coming back so missing school is a big red flag on a continuous basis also youth who potentially have more than one cell phone because they're going to have the cell phone that their family provides them and then they also may have a cell phone that an exploiter provides to them that the parents don't know about Tattooing is another one that we're seeing more and more of and this is tattooing which we consider to be branding so it's tattoos maybe initials of their exploiter a crown, diamonds, money bag, money symbol something that is in a prominent place because the exploiters will brand their victims so that other people know that this is their property other things like that homeless youth for sure if you see homeless youth or youth returning home or to their group home or wherever they may be placed currently in the foster system with things that are expensive expensive clothing, hair, makeup, nails things that they didn't have before and they can't not explain how they have these expensive items so all of those things together are definitely indicators of potentially some things going on and maybe this youth is being exploited okay well thank you and it seems like this is all the time that we have so I would like to thank you guys for coming on here today and if you guys would like more information about the Yolo County District Attorney's Office or human trafficking you can visit their website at www.yoloda.org or you can visit them on their social media platforms on Facebook, Instagram at Yolo.da or on Twitter at YoloDA thanks