The horrors of sex trafficking rattled Dallas City Council members who recently ventured to the Harry Hines Boulevard corridor on police ride-alongs.
One council member said he spotted girls as young as 10 being sold for sex and heard women be denied water because they hadn’t yet made $1,000 for their pimp.
Another council member shivered in his coat as he watched half-clothed girls and women teetering on heels in 40-degree weather. A third described the movements of suspected pimps.
“They are often known suspects, and they’re also cognizant of being known,” council member Adam Bazaldua said during a Dec. 9 council meeting. “They are stopping at every stop sign for three seconds. They are putting their blinker on before every turn. They’re really limiting any opportunity that the officers have to use the tools that are already in their chest.”
The pimps deposit girls and women on the streets and hang close, overseeing, intimidating, enforcing obedience. Some of these criminals are too cautious to make themselves easy police targets.
For all of these reasons, we support the Dallas City Council’s unanimous decision to give police another tool to investigate sex traffickers by expanding an existing “no cruising” ordinance to encompass a 2 1/2-mile stretch along Harry Hines. Police have called this largely commercial business district the “epicenter of prostitution” in the city.
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Under the ordinance, officers can stop a person for driving past a control point at least three times in the course of two hours between 4:30 p.m. and 8 a.m. Although the ordinance does not mention sex trafficking — it was originally passed to reduce congestion — investigators with the vice unit of the Dallas Police Department say it will give them a reason to establish contact with suspected pimps.
As in a traffic stop, officers who pull over a driver for cruising may discover the person has an outstanding warrant, or they may spot drugs or a weapon that would give them reason to investigate.
The prospect of being pulled over might also spook johns or solicitors into avoiding the area. Lt. Gerald Smalley with the vice unit says officers have no intention of fining people running errands or drivers who get lost in the neighborhood.
Critics of the ordinance fear it may lead to racial profiling, and there is also the risk that the new rule might simply push prostitution elsewhere. These are valid concerns, which is why it was prudent for council member Omar Narvaez to suggest a requirement that police collect enforcement statistics and report them to the council’s Public Safety Committee a year from now. We’d also encourage the committee to request an update in six months or earlier to ensure that the city promptly addresses problems. Council members voted to sunset the ordinance in early 2022 but have the option to extend.
Sex trafficking is too complex an issue for a single ordinance to solve. But no city should stand idle while women and girls are made victims before our eyes.
This ordinance is a way to apply at least a little pressure on pimps and johns, and we are hopeful it has success.
Still, the city should keep exploring sensible measures that make it easier to punish those who profit from peddling women’s and girls’ bodies and breaking their spirits. Sex trafficking is a bigger problem than just what we can see in this stretch of our city, so our city continuously needs new ideas to combat this long-term problem.
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Children and women are being sold on Harry Hines, and it's past time to apply pressure on their pimps - The Dallas Morning News
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