Local law enforcement educates public on signs of trafficking before the College World Series

OMAHA, Neb. —

In less than a week, college baseball teams and fans will be traveling from across the country to play at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha.

Local law enforcement said traffickers can be among those in the large crowds.

“It’s not so much that we see, like a whole bunch of new victims popping up. It’s more like you have people traveling into the Omaha metro area,” said Sgt. Brett Schrage of the Omaha Police Department’s Missing Persons and Juvenile Trafficking Unit.

Schrage has been with OPD for nearly 18 years. He started working in the missing persons and juvenile trafficking unit seven years ago.

He said his work consists of “identifying some of the problems that we may have with human trafficking in the Omaha metro area.”

In this time, he’s worked in tandem with Project Harmony’s Missing and Anti-Trafficking Youth Services group.

“They will review every missing youth report from the Omaha community, and that’s a lot of reports,” MATYS Director Taylor Newton said. “I think we average probably between 80 and 100 unique missing youth per month.”

Newton said when they started in 2018, they had 3,200 missing juvenile reports. Last year, that number went down to 2,400.

Through collaboration with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Newton said they found five warning signs of youth exposed to trafficking;

1. Youth found in hotels or motels
2. Involvement in the foster care system
3. Three or more missing reports
4. Victims of sexual assault
5. Child neglect and/or substance abuse

The trends have led to some arrests.

“The end of December of 2020, we were sitting at around approximately 60 confirmed victims of trafficking who we’ve worked their cases and have arrested their traffickers,” Schrage said.

While Schrage’s team works on the investigation side of things, Newton’s team works hand-in-hand with the juveniles.

“You can’t just remove a youth from a trafficking situation, take them out and say, ‘OK, you’re better, everything’s fine,’” Newton said. “You have to be ready to provide what that trafficker was providing to fill that void or also go back to that situation.”

He said the young victim’s needs can vary.

“If the trafficker’s providing housing, then we need to step in and provide housing,” Newton said.

Schrage said when big events like the College World Series roll around, people can look out for things that seem unusual, like odd relationships between a child and adult.

“The other thing is control over documents such as IDs, passports, whatever it could be,” Schrage said. “Traffickers are definitely going to have control of that.”

He said they use the warning signs to get ahead of future exploitation, and they train officers who may not be looking for trafficking victims in the first place.

“Oftentimes that’s where some of our best cases have started,” Schrage said.

Newton said educating young people, and the public, is key.

“Trading acts of sex for something of value or a basic need — that is human trafficking, and then a lot of juveniles don’t make that connection, or they’re not aware of those things,” he said. “The Set Me Free Project, which provides an annual human trafficking training at the beginning of June to raise awareness and make sure the community and other professionals are trained.”

A sentiment shared by the Omaha FBI office.

“The public are our eyes and ears,” Omaha FBI Special Agent in Charge Eugene Kowel said. “People out there attending this event, staying at hotels, they’re the ones most likely to see in dish of human trafficking.”

Newton said people can anonymously report if they’re concerned about repercussions but emphasized if you see something, say something.

“That call or that report that someone may see on the streets, or see at the CWS, could be the piece of the puzzle — or the clue that we need for future intervention,” Newton said.

Here are resources the public can use if your gut is telling you something is off:

• National Human Trafficking Hotline (available 24 hours a day and provides translations of over 200 languages)
• Nebraska Human Trafficking Hotline (available 24 hours a day)
  • For reporting: 833-PLS-LOOK or 833-757-5665
  • For victims: 888-373-7888
• OPD’s Threat Incident Prevention System (TIPS)
• Project Harmony’s Missing and Anti-Trafficking Youth Services
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children

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