Jan. 29--REPORTING FROM SANTA CLARA -- The customer has no idea what he is walking into. He is in his early 30s, dressed kind of schlubby, and wanting to buy some sex on a gorgeous weekday afternoon a stone's throw from Levi's Stadium, home of Super Bowl 50.
He knocks on the door of Room 141. It opens. He disappears.
There will be no happy ending for him today. He will be greeted by a Santa Clara County sheriff's deputy who is posing as a prostitute. Several law enforcement officers will stand with her, just in case. Should he try to flee, he will be stopped by officers who are watching unobtrusively outside.
The man will be cited for engaging in prostitution, a misdemeanor.
While this is going down, Santa Clara County Sheriff's Sgt. Kurtis Stenderup's phone never stops dinging with text alerts.
He runs the sheriff's Human Trafficking Task Force, and he is coordinating the arrival of prostitutes who have been lured to the hotel by undercover officers, the arrival of men like the one who was just caught and the movements of 12 deputies in six unmarked patrol cars around the perimeter of the hotel who are hoping to arrest the real targets of this operation, pimps.
A few minutes later, Stenderup takes me into Room 141. The schlubby man is sitting on the bed, looking slightly dejected. A couple of deputies are standing over him. The "prostitute" he was coming to see is a youthful sheriff's deputy, dressed in jeans and a casual shirt.
Elsewhere in the hotel, a 27-year-old woman with heavy eye makeup and a short, short skirt is sitting on a bed looking concerned. She is a prostitute, who, like the man, was solicited on backpage.com, a popular prostitution website. She had come to this room thinking she was about to have a "date."
Instead, she is being interviewed by trained advocates from the YWCA who are looking for signs of coercion and fear. They will offer her clothes, resources, shelter. She will not be arrested or cited. The presumption is that she is a victim.
These days, law enforcement is centered on ferreting out exploitation and stopping it. "Whether it's in sex trafficking or labor trafficking," Stenderup said, "we're looking for the exploiters. This is modern-day slavery. Our ultimate goal is the recovery of minors who are human trafficking victims."
