‘Now we know’ about prostitution - maybe not

By Timothy Pratt

Wednesday, Oct. 24, 2007 | 7:27 a.m.

Linda Smith intoned a refrain from the lectern with a preacher's best Sunday cadence.

"Girls are trafficked from 28 states ... Now we know. There's no safe place for them ... Now we know," the former Washington congresswoman said, repeating the coda twice more as if it came from on high.

The occasion was a Las Vegas news conference last month at which Shared Hope International released a report called "Demand: A Comparative Examination of Sex Tourism and Trafficking in Jamaica, Japan, the Netherlands and the United States."

Smith, the organization's founder and president, was in Las Vegas because the report included Metro Police statistics and other data on the city, described as having a "sexualized culture" that encourages prostitution.

Within days of Smith's visit, Metro Police challenged Shared Hope's report, saying the group, in its report and on national TV, "incorrectly cites and incorrectly interprets" the department's numbers.

So the question at this point seems to be: What exactly do we know?

Metro Lt. Karen Hughes, who heads the department's vice section, the source of the statistics cited, pointed to the report's assertion that in 2006, "153 minors were arrested for prostitution, but only two pimps were arrested and zero buyers were arrested in these cases."

Not so, Hughes said.

"This makes us look like we're not doing anything," Hughes said.

Actually, Metro arrested 32 pimps last year, she said.

As for buyers - the term Smith's group prefers to "johns," which it thinks dignifies those who pay for prostitutes - Hughes noted that Metro made 283 arrests in 2006. The agency doesn't keep track, however, of whether the prostitutes were adults or minors.

In addition, Hughes pointed out that the footnotes for the statistics cited say they come from Metro's Crimes Against Youth and Family Bureau. But Hughes said the vice section was the source of the numbers. She also takes issue with two of the three other footnotes dealing with Las Vegas.

Alexis Kennedy, a professor of criminal justice at UNLV who researches prostitution, called the series of events "an unusual controversy - that the police department should want to challenge the statistics of a national organization like this."

A colleague who also has worked with police data, criminal justice professor Randall Shelden, said he had not seen a law enforcement agency go through such a report point by point to say , " You got those numbers wrong."

Smith's response to Metro's challenge was to challenge Metro: "It doesn't sound like they cared enough to give us accurate information."

Shared Hope got the numbers in January from Terri Miller, the civilian director of ATLAS, a federally funded task force within Metro aimed at combating human trafficking.

Miller said the state attorney general's office asked her in December to gather statistics for the organization. "A task was requested of me," she said. "I went to my captain for direction on how to fulfill the task and took it from there."

Finally, in September, two days before Shared Hope held its news conference, the group gave Miller a draft of the report to review at an ATLAS meeting. But no one from the vice section attended, Miller said.

"Shared Hope is a respected organization," she added. "I hate to see them going against each other like this, when they could be working together."

Asked why her organization didn't approach vice officers from the start, Smith said: "We don't know who's who in Metro."

Then she returned to her main concern.

"Why aren't they arresting buyers?" Smith asked.

Still, Shared Hope is willing to correct any mistakes on its Web site. "If we can save one child ... we're happy to change the numbers," she said.

As of Monday, Hughes said, no one in Shared Hope had spoken to her about making any corrections.

"What's important is, we need to get the proper numbers out there so the issue is understood, the real picture is painted - and so the organization has credibility."