The traditional role of the vice unit within law enforcement agencies is to investigate vice-related crimes such as prostitution, gambling, bookmaking, pornography, and problems associated with alcoholic beverage control (ABC). The historical role of vice in the United States typically extended into issues of morality and, in some cases, included legal racial containment through the improper use of the Mann Act to deter interracial romantic relationships.¹ The original skill sets needed to serve in a vice unit included a knowledge of the penal codes, the ability to convincingly work undercover operations, and the capacity to build a case for the purpose of prosecution. Although these skills are still needed, the requirements have evolved and expanded for various reasons but especially as the result of community expectations.

Contemporary vice work has become highly specialized and plays a vital role within police agencies and society. A successful vice unit that employs a victim-centered approach could be a good example of community-based policing, a much-needed role in communities that demand police reform, including African American communities. For example, many vice officers today are expected to have extensive knowledge of the traumatic effects of human trafficking, including the ability to identify human trafficking victims among prostituted people and link them to services. These skill sets often mirror the work of social workers and psychologists as well as other jobs dedicated to mitigating social flaws and broken systems.²

In addition, some vice units are increasingly focusing on quality-of-life issues, putting them in a position to be able to resolve community-based demands. Drawing again from the field of human trafficking, many trauma-informed, victim-centered vice units have expertise with the ability to combat sex trafficking and rescue the most vulnerable from the grips of those who use fraud, force, and coercion to take away power and humanity from their victims. Although many departments have formally trained their vice officers on identifying and investigating sex trafficking crimes while implementing a victim-centered approach, there are some that have implemented the training but do not exercise a victim-centered approach. Trust, understanding, and a willingness to acknowledge the profession’s own biases are essential and can be the difference between forward-thinking police reform and stagnation.

In order to create a vice unit to meet the demands of police reform and crime reduction and to gain community trust, agents must recognize the numerous barriers that stand in the way of the African American community and cause legal estrangement.³ Barriers such as historical distrust, racial tension, disproportionate arrest statistics, lack of economic opportunities within the inner city, and implicit bias are just a few challenges needing attention. Although law enforcement cannot cure all the ills of a broken system, its high visibility as a symbol of authority and government creates an expectation of solving what is wrong in society.

Some police agencies do not have vice units, some agencies eliminate or scale down the vice unit when there is a need to fill field assignments, and some communities want to get rid of vice units. The demands of society cannot be ignored, and a “business as usual” approach will not meet those demands. A creative solution would be to look to trauma-informed, victim-centered vice units as one of the many tools toward police reform in order to promote a better relationship with black communities.

Agencies must create a culture that reflects humility and community partnership to adequately serve while contributing to crime reduction and proper victim care and identification. Using the concept of adverse community trauma is an excellent starting point for this discussion. Understanding the deep-rooted problems of the community allows agencies to explore viable solutions.

Adverse Community Trauma  

“No epidemic has ever been resolved by paying attention to the treatment of the affected individual.”⁴
—Dr. George Albee

The Prevention Institute in northern California received funding to research the impact of trauma. The research did not focus solely on individual trauma but also on how it affects a community and its population. The theme and findings of the research determined that trauma could negatively impact a community’s ability to make effective decisions and move toward positive solutions.

According to the study, “The impact of trauma extends beyond the individuals who directly witness or experience violence. Trauma is also produced by structural violence, which prevents people and communities from meeting their basic needs.”⁵ Community trauma is much broader than individuals impacting individuals. It is the sense that trauma can have an impact on a population. Understanding the symptoms of community trauma can help agencies build positive partnerships to reduce crime, while creating safe places for people to live and work.

The Symptoms of Community Trauma

The Prevention Institute’s research highlights three symptoms of trauma that can derail community resilience and damage progressive community efforts:

1. The social-cultural environment: High concentrations of poverty and inner-city urban decay that erode networking and trust and negatively impacts the ability to act and institute change

2. The physical/built environment: Dilapidated buildings, poor transportation services, and the pressures of gentrification create a fear of being displaced

3. The economic environment: The stress of living with inadequate access to economic and educational opportunities

Communities demonstrating these symptoms experience high rates of violence, and those who live in such environments run the risk of experiencing polyvictimization. Polyvictimization can be seen in sex trafficking victims who often have multiple adverse experiences due to rape, robbery, domestic violence, and childhood sexual and physical abuse. A person whose life is disrupted as a result of multiple forms of victimization, coupled with community trauma, may have trouble making decisions. The inability to make decisions on an individual level could then merge into a community where it is hard to come together to make decisions necessary to combat community violence: “traumatized people interacting with other traumatized people—a community can really run the risk of imploding.”⁶

The research findings imply that communities with trauma may legitimize structural violence when partnering with police departments. Communities would work against their own best interests by enhancing suppression through containment tactics as methods of crime reduction. Solutions to curb such violence may include victim blaming, arrests of victims, and over policing of communities. These types of reactions are derived from an inability to come up with collective decisions that may be best for the community.

Although the symptoms described are not solely experienced by black communities, the trauma can be found in the poverty, unemployment, failing infrastructure, and violence witnessed in many black communities. These black communities provide the framework of community trauma needed to demonstrate how important vice units can be to improve these relationships. It is important to note that these same symptoms also become push factors for prostituted people. Vice units can assist black communities in restructuring and building a community that is environmentally safe, resilient, and thriving.

The Potential of Vice Units in Constructing Positive Community Relations

Police can play a critical role in maintaining and leading efforts toward crime reduction and the improvement of quality-of-life issues. The researchers’ recommendations of resilience coupled with the duties of trauma-informed, victim-centered vice units can provide solutions to the symptoms of community trauma.

The Social-Cultural Environment

• Vice supervisors can collaborate with neighborhood watch or other community organizations located in areas with a high frequency of prostitution to collectively resolve and reduce it.
• Vice supervisors, along with community partners such as academics and nonprofit organizations within the community, can facilitate human trafficking awareness training for the community to change the narrative that all prostituted people are there by choice.
• Restorative justice can be used when applicable, along with creative ways to prosecute, eliminating prosecutions solely based on the victim’s testimony or arrest of sex trafficking victims.

Physical/Built Environment

• Community meetings with commanding officers or community liaison officers can take the temperature of the community and provide solutions to improve quality of life.
• ABC permit hearings can assist in the reduction of strip clubs, liquor stores, and bars in order to discourage additional ABC-licensed establishments.

Economic Environment

• Establishing relationships with human trafficking nonprofits who specialize in housing, jobs, education, and counseling can help promote economic opportunities for victims.

• Promote job training and encourage law enforcement recruitment within existing agency youth programs.

Recommendations for Police Chiefs

Police chiefs and command staff play a vital role in the assignment of personnel and an agency’s culture.

The following recommendations balance police cultural change and scholarly solutions to community trauma reduction:

• Every officer within a department should be trained on all forms of human trafficking, through the lens of a victim-centered approach. Such training can be provided by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, National Center on Sexual Exploitation, Selah Way Foundation, and human trafficking conference attendance, just to name a few.
• Do not deplete vice units; instead, engage them as part of the solution for police reform.
• Hold vice officers to a higher standard: numerous community complaints should be considered a negative when selecting personnel for the unit.
• Make vice an appealing job that is a pathway toward promotion.
• Only officers who have demonstrated acceptance and understanding of a victim-centered approach should be eligible to work vice.

• Rename the vice unit to reflect the goal of community relations and positive change.
• Consider moving human trafficking investigations to a special victim unit that uses a victim-centered and trauma-informed model.
• Change the measurement of success based on high prostitution arrest numbers to the numbers of nonprofit organization referrals.
• Conduct vigorous investigations of vice-related police misconduct.

Conclusion

The role of vice units has changed. Society is demanding that police departments reimagine their role and reform. The vice unit is only one piece of the puzzle for change—the understanding of trauma and collaboration with all stakeholders, including nonprofit organizations, needs to be instituted across agencies. Law enforcement must play a role in determining the changes they want to see. However, it should be noted that in order for a vice unit to be a viable solution to police reform, the unit must be properly trained and demonstrate a victim-centered approach. Vice units able to demonstrate these qualities should not be dismissed as “just a misdemeanor unit” but incorporated in the reform process as opposed to eliminated. Black communities benefit from police agencies that authentically care about the people they serve. In addition, plainclothes officers that work vice are less intimidating and can address quality-of-life issues for the community. If vice personnel can eliminate one bar or liquor store and, at the same time, prevent human beings from being bought on the street, this would be the beginning of a good relationship with great intentions. Think outside the box and the rest will come to fruition.

Notes:

¹David J. Langum, Crossing Over the Line: Legislating Morality and the Mann Act (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).

²Amy Farrell and Shea Cronin, “Policing Prostitution in an Era of Human Trafficking Enforcement,” Crime Law and Social Change 64 (December 2015): 211–228.

³Monica C. Bell Monica, “Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement,” Yale Law Journal 126, no. 7 (May 2017): 2054–2150.

⁴Rachel Davis, Howard Pinderhughes, and Myesha Williams, Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience: A Framework for Addressing and Preventing Community Trauma (Oakland, CA: Prevention Institute, 2016), 7.

⁵Davis, Pinderhughes, and Williams, Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience, 3.

⁶Davis, Pinderhughes, and Williams, Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience.

Please cite as

Stephany Powell, “Sex Trafficking and Vice: Addressing Quality-of-Life Issues through Police Reform in the African American Community,” Police Chief Online, October 28, 2020.