Barrett Odenbach was new on the streets of Louisville when he encountered a woman he suspected was a sex worker.
The evidence he had matched the crime, and without looking beyond the information in front of him, Odenbach arrested the woman and brought her to jail.
About a week later, he received a call from the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office. They asked him if he realized the woman he arrested was a victim of human trafficking. She was brought to Colorado from Washington and was forced to have sex with people for money.
“I had no idea and of course I felt bad,” said Odenbach, a Louisville Police Department corporal who has been with the agency for six years. “It got me thinking that I am focusing on these people as suspects and not thinking of them as victims.”
Until Odenbach had encountered sex trafficking — just one form of human trafficking — the crime had not been on his radar. He didn’t have much training or experience with it to know what signs to look for or where to begin looking.
Since that encounter, he has made an effort to look beyond the obvious while investigating cases he’s assigned, he said. Like him, other law enforcement agencies in Boulder County are also working to do the same. Recently, the Boulder County District Attorney’s Office hired a new full-time investigator who will dedicate her time solely to human trafficking cases.
“It’s just an onion that you keep peeling back,” Odenbach said. “Our chief is really good, and his main thing for patrol guys is to investigate beyond the obvious. It is easy for cops to focus on the probability instead of the possibility.”
Flying under the radar
In 2000, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed by the federal government, giving the FBI the ability to prosecute the crime nationally.
Colorado’s first statute was passed in 2006 but was later repealed and replaced in 2014 with three statutes: one for sex trafficking, one for labor trafficking and a separate statute for sex trafficking of minors.
Before the new statutes, Colorado’s data gave the impression that human trafficking was not really occurring in the state: from 2006 to 2014 there were only three convictions for human trafficking.
In the years since, the numbers have continued to show just the opposite.
From 2017 to 2019, Denver alone had 17 human trafficking convictions, 14 cases pending and eight cases dismissed. There have also been 295 filings for one of the three human trafficking statutes in Denver from 2014 to 2019, said Maria Trujillo, human trafficking program manager with the Colorado Human Trafficking Council.
“It’s a perfect example of ‘if you build it they will come’,” she said. “They didn’t have many cases until they updated the statutes.”
Since the new statutes were passed, Boulder County has formed a multidisciplinary team, which is composed of law enforcement agencies, the DA’s office, human services and organizations like walk-in centers.
The team meets monthly to try to identify people that are at-risk for human trafficking. Examples of at-risk individuals who may be targets of human trafficking include people experiencing homelessness, members of the LGBTQ community, people of color, immigrants and people who have experienced trauma, said Boulder County District Attorney Michael Dougherty.
He added that Colorado is sometimes overlooked as a hotspot for human trafficking. However, its wide income gap, multiple interstate highways and international airport all add up to make the state a hotbed for trafficking.
“Often what’s interesting about these cases is they are not usually confined to one county, usually they cross jurisdictional lines,” he said.
But the new statutes and a team that meets once a month was not enough to truly investigate and pursue cases as complex as those involving human trafficking usually are. So the Boulder County DA’s office took it a step further and hired an investigator after seeing the impact Denver’s specialized units had.
“It’s a real priority for us, and we recognize that since we are in this Denver metro area and we see these cases here in Boulder County, we need to make sure we have specially designated people handling these cases in addition to the multidisciplinary team we already have in place,” Dougherty said.
Both the Denver DA’s office and the Denver Police Department allocated funding a few years back to create units that strictly handle human trafficking cases.
The extra investment was needed, said Chief Deputy Lara Mullin with the Denver DA’s Office. Even with the new statutes, the case numbers did not really budge in Denver until the crime was sought out.
When someone is robbed or a shooting occurs, typically the victim calls police to report the crime.
That’s not how human trafficking works.
“I believe that law enforcement across the board felt like it wasn’t happening in our community,” said Chief Deputy Lara Mullin with the Denver DA’s Office. “We weren’t seeing filed cases, we weren’t getting complaints specifically alleging human trafficking.”
After investigators with the unit started working with organizations such as domestic violence shelters and drop-in centers, their case numbers began to increase.
“When we started digging, there was human trafficking happening — you just had to ask the right questions,” she said. “They weren’t coming in the traditional way.”
Mullin said it can be difficult for law enforcement agencies to find room in their limited budgets to hire and train staff to investigate a crime that is not really reported in their jurisdictions. But for her unit, the decision has paid off.
The Denver DA’s unit went from zero cases to 31 cases filed and multiple cases at the grand injury in four years, she said.
“I certainly engage with law enforcement all across the country who don’t believe this is happening in this community,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s because they are turning a blind eye. It’s just that they haven’t seen the cases. No one is picking up the phone and calling 911 and saying ‘I am a victim of human trafficking.’”
A specialized skill
Although the Denver agencies were able to squeeze room in their budgets to create units dedicated to human trafficking, for now, Edna Munoz will be Boulder County’s sole investigator.
The DA’s Office received a four-year federal grant to create Munoz’s position. For its first year, it received $130,200, which will pay Munoz’s salary and benefits. The funding will most likely decrease by about 10% each year, said Shannon Carbone, spokesperson for the DA’s office.
“It’s one position, but I think it’s a really important step in the right direction,” Dougherty said.
Many years ago, Dougherty served as the deputy chief for the sex crimes unit in New York City, he said. During that time, he thought, if the unit assigns two officers to investigate human trafficking cases it will make a difference.
“We quickly realized it was a mistake,” he said. “Often when someone is arrested in a prostitution-related offense or is a victim of a sex offense, they may also be the victim of human trafficking. You need people that are specially trained and dedicated to working with them and supporting them to find out what’s going on below the tip of the iceberg.”
That specially trained person for Boulder County is Munoz, who previously worked in Longmont Public Safety Department’s domestic violence unit for two years.
She was given her first real peek inside the world of human trafficking when she joined the organization Arms of Love International, which supports abandoned and abused children in Nicaragua and the Philippines.
“I really started to get a wider view of what human trafficking looked like and started to realize it’s not what we see in movies,” she said.
Relationships between the trafficker and person being trafficked are incredibly complex, Munoz said. It could be a parent trafficking a child, a boyfriend trafficking a girlfriend, a boss trafficking an employee — the list goes on.
“I think the training you need to take care of these cases is very specialized,” she said. “If you don’t know what you’re looking for it’s difficult to get to the bottom of it.”
Munoz said she recently completed an in-person training on human trafficking and is still just starting out in the role. Her goals are to grow the team beyond herself, to become a resource for other law enforcement agencies and to continue working with organizations in the area that support victims of trafficking.
“It takes a very specific person to want to tell their stories,” she said. “Unfortunately (at) a lot of the agencies, everyone is so short-staffed that it is difficult to ask agencies to go out and do more than they are supposed to do.”
Detective Sandie Jones with the Longmont Public Safety Department said she looks forward to utilizing Munoz as a resource and will bring her along in the coming weeks to meet with an at-risk girl.
“I think it will help a lot because we are inundated with so many cases,” she said. “It’s a huge asset to all of us.”
Jones said Longmont has never applied for a grant like the one DA’s office received.
Jones said she has been with the department for 24 years and has worked on cases that she has suspected to be trafficking but no trafficking-related charges have ever been filed.
“The hardest part is getting them to trust me and talk to me about what’s really going on,” she said.
Preying on a weakness
Fostering that trust is one reason staff at Tgthr are observant of any new changes among the youth they serve.
When a kid walks in with new, expensive shoes, advocates approach the situation with curiosity and gentleness, said Claire Cronin, behavioral health and wellness director with Boulder-based Tgthr.
A pair of new shoes or a new job can be sign of something more, she said.
“Runaway or homeless youth are very vulnerable,” she said. “We most often see (trafficking) at our shelter and drop-in program. They were picked up by a company that said they would pay them wages and picked them up and transported them across state lines and now they have to work off their debt. We have seen sex trafficking and sleeping with someone to get shelter.”
The organization provides housing to people 12 to 24 years old in addition to other resources.
Cronin said adults aren’t allowed at the facility, and Tgthr’s staff are mindful of any adults that interact with its youth. By spending time developing relationships with their clients, along with completing trainings on human trafficking, employees have learned how prevalent trafficking really is.
“So many of our clients, if you were to ask them ‘Have you ever been trafficked?’ they would say no because they don’t recognize that,” she said. “I suspect there is a much higher number of trafficking (victims) than we know of.”
Blue Sky Bridge, which is part of Boulder County’s multidisciplinary team, works with children who have suffered abuse, which includes human trafficking, said Gina Maione Earles, executive director of Blue Sky Bridge.
“We know that the issue we deal with more broadly is child sexual abuse,” she said. “We know that one in 10 children are sexually abused before they turn 18. Trafficking is very, very hard to uncover. The data just isn’t there yet.”
Many times children are brought to Blue Sky Bridge by law enforcement. That’s when the organization’s interviewers meet with the children to listen to their stories and hear what they’ve been through.
“These vulnerable children may come to Blue Sky Bridge for sexual assault (and) we may discover this child is also being cultivated in human trafficking,” Maione Earles said. “Our interviewers have approached this differently than any other case that comes to the Blue Sky Bridge. We work really really hard to build trust with these children. That’s the biggest part of the challenge.”
A different approach
While investigating a case in Jefferson County years ago, Christian Gardner-Wood learned that people suspected of stealing vehicles were actually part of a larger crime: They were part of a human trafficking ring.
They had been forced by their trafficker to steal cars but because the crime was not initially investigated as a human trafficking case, they were arrested. That then created mistrust between the victims of human trafficking and police, said Gardner-Wood, now the Boulder County chief deputy district attorney.
“So then tomorrow maybe they are identified as a human trafficking victim and maybe a law enforcement officer wants to talk to them,” he said. “The problem is, they are going to say ‘Why should I talk to you because the person that wore the same badge as you yesterday just threw me into jail, so why should I trust you?’”
Gardner-Wood said that’s part of what makes prosecuting human trafficking so complicated. It takes time and commitment to build relationships with victims, survivors and advocates.
The DA’s office is hopeful Munoz will be the point person to help other agencies learn what human trafficking looks like. In addition, she will also have the time needed to dig beyond surface-level information.
“When there are those questions, (Munoz) will be able to answer them and really follow up with that individual victim and try to provide services and ask questions (and) see if there is something we can do from a prosecution perspective,” he said.
While a deeper understanding of the crime and more time is required to investigate human trafficking, ordinances can also be changed or replaced — like they have been before — to prevent victims of human trafficking from being charged.
This summer, a new massage parlor ordinance in Denver will take effect and will give the city the authority to regulate those businesses. In the past, if there were reports of illicit activity at the business, the worker was the one charged for a crime such as prostitution rather than the business.
Aurora first passed this ordinance years ago, but soon Denver police learned businesses, which were shut down in Aurora, were moving to Denver and opening under a new name, Gardner-Wood said.
Now the two cities will be able to work together to keep an eye on the businesses. When a business does relocate from Aurora to Denver, police can investigate it and shut it down.
Gardner-Wood said Boulder County is considering a similar ordinance because it takes some of the work off the table for investigators. Instead of having to prove the crime is human trafficking or charging the employee with prostitution, if they do not reveal that they are being trafficked, law enforcement can shut the business down after receiving reports of illegal activity.
“We are looking at it and saying this is on the manager and the owner of the business to be responsible for what’s happening at their business,” he said.
Falling short
When now Detective Beth McNalley joined the Boulder Police Department about 13 years ago, she didn’t understand the many shapes human trafficking can have.
When a former detective retired from the department, she was the only person interested in joining the county’s multidisciplinary team.
“I’ve never been able to turn away from a challenge, specifically with children — there is no truer or greater victim than a child,” she said.
McNalley is the only human trafficking investigator for the department. She has nine open cases that are either confirmed human trafficking or possible trafficking. In the past two years she has worked on about 33 cases involving concerns of human trafficking.
“I certainly have cases open currently that are human-trafficking related that I would like to devote more time to but my unit is now down to three,” she said.
Because many patrol officers still have not been trained on human trafficking, she gives her cell phone number out to her colleagues who may suspect a case is linked to human trafficking but do not have the specialized background to know for sure.
“I would rather triage at 10 p.m. than two weeks later and get behind the eight ball,” she said. “If officers are not asking those extra questions, it leads to a lot more room for these trafficking cases to slip through the cracks.”
McNalley’s willingness to support officers even when she is not working paid off when a a patrol officer called her about a case that eventually led to a human trafficking charge.
The case involved Randolph “Randy” Scott Clark, who has been charged with human trafficking, pimping, sexual assault, pandering — arranging prostitution and invasion of privacy. Clark’s next court appearance is slated for Feb. 17.
Since joining the department, she has pushed for annual trainings for law enforcement on human trafficking and has asked for the Boulder Police Department to update its policy for chronic runaways so officers are required to ask more follow up questions after juveniles have run away. Right now, officers are not required to ask repeat runaways all of the follow up questions if they have run away three or more times.
McNalley said her requests have not been fulfilled by the department. Officials with the Boulder Police Department did not comment on her assertions before publication.
Thanks to training seminars and outreach from the Colorado Human Trafficking Council, McNalley said she has noticed more awareness among the community, though it is still common for communities members to be alarmed or shocked when they learn human trafficking is occurring in their neighborhood.
But it isn’t just Boulder County residents who are surprised by the cases in the area.
“It’s one thing when community members are shocked to hear I investigate human trafficking cases, but it’s not OK in-house from other officers to not believe that it’s occurring.”
McNalley said the disbelief she hears from her fellow staff members happens more than it should.
“It’s difficult feeling that you’re constantly coming up short for your victims,” she said. “You’re not given the training, and you’re not given enough staffing to truly (take) the additional steps.”
Human trafficking in Colorado
According to officials with the FBI, the longest serving sentence in U.S. history for someone convicted of human trafficking was Brock Franklin of Arapahoe County. He received 400 years to life for human trafficking. Other Coloradans who are serving lengthy sentences for human trafficking include
- Chauncey Price of Douglas County who is serving 304 years to life;
- Paul Burman of Weld County who is serving 248 years to life; and
- Robert Gonzales of Jefferson County who is serving 105 years to life.
Reporting human trafficking
Colorado’s human trafficking hotline is open 24/7. To report human trafficking or for help in Colorado call 866-455-5075. A texting hotline is also available between noon to midnight at 720-999-9724.
The national human trafficking hotline is operated by the nonprofit agency Polaris. People can call in tips or survivors and victims of human trafficking can make a report by calling 888-373-7888 or by texting “be free” to 233-733.
According to the Polaris’ most recent report card, which grades states by criminal relief laws for survivors of human trafficking, Colorado scored an F. Although some of its laws have been amended since the report was released, more can be done to improve the laws for victims of human trafficking, said Chief Deputy Lara Mullin with the Denver DA’s office.
“We certainly have taken the critique in the report card to heart,” she said. “We are working on improving some of those areas.”
Community resources, tips on human trafficking awareness
Some people view human trafficking through a lens painted by Hollywood. They watch the movie “Taken” where a girl is kidnapped by strange men and is forced to have sex with people for money.
But in reality, the crime has many more layers.
“I think the challenge in identifying a trafficker is they can be anyone,” said Christine Rinke, chief trial deputy for Boulder County District Attorney’s Office. “There is no profile for it.”
The training and awareness to catch and prevent human trafficking does not just fall on law enforcement but is also up to schools, family and friends. It’s important that parents or guardians ask questions and stay involved with children’s activities and online presence, Rinke said.
“Social media is a huge way that people can approach others online in a way that feels initially harmless,” she said. “Kids go and meet up with other people whether it is other people their age or strangers.”
Trainings by the Colorado Human Trafficking Council can be requested by agencies such as schools, businesses and law enforcement agencies. More information is available at bit.ly/3GoVGlZ.
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