Much of the success lies in a new avenue of investigation - a collaboration with community nonprofits that are contacted by women in trouble, often Chinese women who were trafficked from their native country or after they arrived in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other major U.S. The office currently has 38 open trafficking cases, and worked with city officials to pass the new massage business ordinance. One of those cases was a hard-to-come-by labor trafficking conviction this year, the first in Denver. The Denver District Attorney’s Office has closed 40 trafficking cases, either through trial or plea, in the four years since it started its trafficking unit, a team that has grown to seven from one. Denver has spent the past four years building a robust investigative team to tackle hard-to-make human and labor trafficking cases, and the payoff is coming through convictions.
Now Colorado’s capital city - thanks to a massage parlor ordinance passed in July and one of the only district attorney’s offices and police departments in the state with dedicated human trafficking units - is poised for battle. When Aurora cracked down on massage businesses involved in human trafficking, the “bad apples” moved their operations across city lines into Denver.
