During Super Bowl LX, Bay Area Advocates and Police Renew Focus on Human Trafficking Awareness

For those working to prevent human trafficking throughout the year, Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara provides high-profile visibility for their cause.

As security increases for the big game, advocates, local governments and law enforcement agencies are beefing up efforts to curb human coercion ahead of and during the Super Bowl, which has already drawn massive crowds and money to the Bay Area. In addition, the National Football League, in partnership with the Bay Area Host Committee, is offering its financial support.

“I don’t know if there’ll ever be a day that everyone’s going to talk about human trafficking happening, but I’m going to throw that shot in the dark and attempt to through this powerful platform,” said Cheryl Csiky, executive director of the Portland-based nonprofit In Our Backyard and herself a survivor of human trafficking.

Each year, Csiky travels to Super Bowl host cities for outreach. Around a week before Super Bowl LX, she helped hand out booklets of photos at Santa Clara University featuring three dozen missing kids registered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children who are believed to be at risk for exploitation.

“The point of our event is to have people visit a convenience store, their regular gas station, bring in these books and get convenience stores to realize they are the eyes and ears of our community,” she said.

According to Csiky, last year, 15 out of 36 missing children were recovered within a week of the Super Bowl in New Orleans, the result of coordinated efforts with the Center and law enforcement.

“The amount of investment that is provided at the time of these large events is hard to replicate at other times,” said Sharan Dhanoa, director of the South Bay Coalition to End Human Trafficking, one of several local nonprofits that recently received grants to combat the issue from the NFL through the Bay Area Host Committee.

Last year, her group and its crisis intervention partners served 361 survivors who met the federal definition of trafficking — that is, forced, fraudulent or coercive labor. Out of 1,800 youth screened for potential signs of trafficking, more than 300 were identified as a possible or clear concern.

The last time the Super Bowl came to the Bay Area in 2016, more than a dozen pimps were arrested, and seven youth, as young as 14, several of whose parents had reported them missing, were reportedly rescued from sexual exploitation in the week leading up to the game.

While longstanding research has not found a large surge in human trafficking during the Super Bowl — something experts posit could be associated with the temporarily heightened scrutiny and media attention — Dhanoa said the multi-jurisdictional cooperation and extra resources it attracts help combat the problem.

“You’ve got tens of thousands of people coming to the Bay Area from all over the United States and even other parts of the world,” said Jeff Rosen, district attorney for Santa Clara County. “You wouldn’t think that illegitimate businesses would also seek to profit from that?”

His office is leading an anti-trafficking task force comprised of more than 50 law enforcement officers, crime analysts and prosecutors across the region’s nine counties to intercept exploiters through undercover stings, online investigations and lots of overtime. Social workers, nonprofit service providers, the FBI and other federal partners support this effort, too, Rosen said.

He added that the task force will prosecute traffickers and not people selling sex — whether they are exploited or acting independently, though he said he believes the latter represent just a small proportion of those involved in the sex trade.

According to Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, director of Arizona State University’s Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention and Research, the number of “renegade” or independent sex workers — who have always operated without a pimp, for example — might be as low as 10%, with nine out of 10 people arrested on prostitution charges in Phoenix over a decade having been trafficked at some point.

Still, operations framed as anti-trafficking tend to expose people selling sex — particularly migrants — to serious legal and immigration risks, said Maxine Doogan, founder of the San Francisco-based Erotic Service Provider Legal, Education and Research Project, which aims to challenge stigmas about sex work and dismantle what the group considers harmful laws.

Doogan said she worried that ahead of Super Bowl LX, local police departments’ vice squads would continue to enforce anti-prostitution laws on the books.

“You don’t need to arrest somebody for prostitution to rescue them from a situation,” she said. “The sex industry has been taking care of people who are involved in forced labor or in danger for decades. We’ve never had to arrest anybody.”

In a statement to KQED, the San José Police Department said its Special Victims Unit uses a “victim-centered, trauma-informed approach to human trafficking enforcement” where individuals involved in prostitution are “treated as potential victims first.”

SJPD did not respond to questions about overall prostitution arrest data and protocol for its Vice Unit, which the department’s website lists as the contact for prostitution-related crimes.

Rosen said that deterrence and moral obligation matter more than statistics.

“If it turns out there were no trafficking victims freed and not a trafficker found during the Super Bowl,” he said, “money well spent.”