The Effect Of The Tarrant County Taskforce On The Community

To understand how a police department combats against human trafficking, I interviewed Felicia Grantham. Ms. Grantham is the Human Trafficking Coordinator for Tarrant County 5- Stones Taskforce, a division of the Fort Worth Police Department. She informed me that the TC 5-Stones Taskforce was officially sanctioned by Chief Fitzgerald as an arm of the Fort Worth Police Department on January 1st, 2016, but the vision for it began long before that. Ms. Grantham had her first meeting with then-Chief Halstead in July of 2014 asking if they could start a community discussion on the topic of human trafficking. The Taskforce birthed from that movement. After graduation, I plan to work as a law enforcement officer, and my county does not

Basing on the interview the task force coordinator says that lack of knowledge within the department and community is the primary causative agent of increased human trafficking crimes. According to her, when a department, agency or community is not well educated, chances are higher signs of a crime will be missed. The Tarrant County Taskforce impacts the community through several interactive projects. These different projects have formed not only to educate civilians about the offense but also to spread awareness of the same. According to the Tarrant County 5-Stones Taskforce website, two of the many projects for the Taskforce is “A Not in My City” campaign and “Educational presentations.” (“Forth Worth Police/Tarrant County”) To create awareness the “not my city” project is a form of a campaign whereby, hundreds of volunteers come out to aid in the process of distributing flyers to area businesses and

Due to lack or inadequate training, it is difficult for law enforcement officers to identify a human trafficking case thus hard to investigate the suspected trafficking case. According to research most of the law enforcement agencies hardly realized the acts of human trafficking and most of them had officials who could not handle such situations due to lack of training. This inadequacy cultivated the growth of such an act to a higher level such that by the time they realized its impact, it was almost too late. In the interview, the coordinator admits that the department not only trains all their recruits on human trafficking but also goes to the extent of offering the training to other law enforcement department when they request them to do so. Through this the, US ensure that besides having enough law enforcement officers capable of handling human trafficking, the officers train through identifying such crimes and improved methods of investigating human trafficking cases. This additional training provides an excellent tactical position to deal with the increasing cases of drug trafficking not only in the US but also other parts of the world where the crimes are linked to