RIVIERA BEACH, Fla. — With nearly 900 calls to the human trafficking hotline in 2019 alone, Florida ranked third nationwide, behind only California and Texas.
With that in mind, the Port of Palm Beach this month undertook to train its staff and tenants in how to spot what might happen on their watch.
That's not just sex trafficking but labor trafficking, said Mar Brettmann, CEO of BEST Alliance, the nonprofit that provided the port with the online course. BEST is an acronym for Businesses Ending Slavery and Trafficking, and was launched eight years ago on the premise that businesses are essential to prevent and report trafficking.
The Port of Palm Beach is the first Florida port to sign up for the nonprofit's maritime learning unit.
Brettmann said that her organization has been getting many requests from Florida hotels for instruction this year as well, thanks to a state law that took effect Jan. 1 that says a hotel that doesn't provide training in trafficking prevention can be fined $2,000 a day.
"I'm getting requests at 6 a.m.," the Seattle-based executive said.
Working through the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, whose membership claims half the hotels in the U.S., her organization already has trained hundreds of Florida hospitality industry workers. BEST also hopes to sign up its first Florida airport this year, she said.
Yaremi Farinas, spokeswoman for the Port of Palm Beach, said she was updating the port's social media accounts last October and came across a post from the Port of Seattle about a program it was running for its employees, offering the course to others for free. She received her certification and introduced the course to others at the port, winning approval from Port Director Manny Almira and the port commission to contract for the entire staff and port tenants to take the half-hour online course, for a total of $299.
"We're going to continue to push this until everybody who works at the port, anyone who does business here, whether truckers, or customers or tenants, takes this training," said Rick Placeres, the port's manager of operations and security.
The gist is to train port employees to look for evidence of a person exerting high levels of control over another person or group, Brettmann said. They also need to look for signs of distress or injury, she said.
Signs of confusion are another giveaway, she said — if someone doesn't seem to know where they're going, where they are or why they aren't being paid. Paying for sex with a child or with an adult trafficking victim also constitutes trafficking under the law, she said.
In some cases the victim is a laborer forced to work on a ship, or someone "engaged in survival sex, in order just to live on the cruise ship," she said.
Port workers are taught to look for nervousness, or when one person is talking for an entire group.
All employees of the Port of Palm Beach are being urged to take the trafficking-prevention training.
Phone numbers, for port workers who spot something suspicious to call, are posted at every gate, Placeres said.
Often the most effective thing a port worker can do is just to approach someone who's alone and ask how they are, and if they need help, and if they do, to help them call the hotline, Brettman said.
Brettman recalled speaking to a human trafficking survivor who said she hadn't been in a frame of mind to reach out for help, but that if someone had just turned to her and said, "Do you need help, are you OK?" then she would have said, "Yeah, I need help."
According to statistics compiled on the hotline website, humantrafficking.org, 896 human trafficking cases were reported to the hotline in 2019, up from 760 in 2018, 622 in 2017, 562 in 2016 and 418 in 2015. Brettman says the upward trend in reporting isn't entirely a bad sign, because it could reflect growing awareness that help is available and that educational efforts are paying off.
Looking back, Placeres doesn't think the port missed past cases. About 85% of the containers unloaded at the port are empty, as they're coming back from having delivered food and other exports to The Bahamas and Caribbean. A scanner used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection likely would have picked up people being brought in that way, he said.
Still, 25 of the 55 port employees have taken the non-mandatory training and everyone who has boots on the ground at the port, including ship crew members, should take the course, Placeres said, calling it eye-opening.
His goal for course attendance is 100% participation, he said. "Everybody who deals with the port."
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