United States Senators lying about Sex Trafficking Statistics
By Tim Cushing (Techdirt)
Two Texas Republicans, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe of the Houston area, are co-sponsoring a bill that would impose stiff penalties on these adult victimizers of up to life in prison. The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act, which has bipartisan support in both houses, would supplement an existing law that focuses primarily on punishing sex-trafficking organizations abroad. Poe and Cornyn estimate that one-quarter of U.S. sex-trafficking victims have Texas roots. Poe says our state’s proximity to Mexico and high immigrant population give the state a particularly high profile. In Houston alone, about 300,000 sex trafficking cases are prosecuted each year. Tighter border controls and reduced profit margins from the drug trade are pushing organized crime groups to turn increasingly to sex trafficking, law enforcers say.
That ridiculous figure, which posits that Houston prosecutes nearly 900 sex traffickers a day (if working 365 days a year), has since been removed by the editorial squad at Dallas Morning News. The update line notes that “inaccurate numbers” had been used and have since been deleted. (The original version can be found here towards the middle of the page.) This amazing claim was completely debunked by Houston criminal defense attorney Mark Bennett, who broke down actual prosecution stats and the possible rationale behind the Dallas News’ decision to run with the 300,000/year claim.
Nobody seems to know where that 300,000 number comes from. (Maggie McNeill suggests a plausible genesis here and here.) It’s a couple of orders of magnitude less obviously wrong than the same number attributed to Houston, but still glaringly obviously wrong—if the wrongness of “300,000 sex-trafficking cases in Houston” were equivalent to getting smacked upside the head with a 2X4, “300,000 sex-trafficking cases in the United States” would be getting poked in the arm with a fork.
That’s the hype. Here are the numbers.
In Harris County, according to Texas Office of Court Administration statistics, 36,862 new felony cases were filed and 68,142 new misdemeanor cases were filed in 2012. So the total of all new cases filed in Harris County is nowhere near the 300,000 sex trafficking cases asserted by the Dallas Morning News.
Bennett speculates the DMN may have just misquoted Rep. Ted Poe, one of the sponsors of the bill.
Poe, a Republican from Humble, said sex trafficking rings prey on the large number of immigrant women and girls living in the Houston area and across Texas, accounting for a disproportionate share of the estimated 300,000 sex trafficking cases prosecuted each year.
As Bennett points out, there aren’t even 300,000 federal prosecutions nationwide per year. 2010’s report shows only 91,047 people being prosecuted in federal courts, so even Poe’s nationwide claim is demonstrably false. Even more damning are these numbers.
Federally funded human trafficking task forces opened 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking for investigation between January 2008 and June 2010.
Now, it’s bad enough that one of the bill’s sponsors would throw out an unresearched “statistic” like this while pushing legislation. But that’s somewhat expected from our politicians, especially when they’ve got a horse in the race. But it’s even worse when a journalistic entity not only takes this stat at face value, but makes it comically worse by severely reducing its scope from national to local. Mistakes will be made occasionally. I understand that. But this one should never have made it past the first round of editing. Certainly Rep. Poe is partially to blame for this, but the paper’s editorial team should know that presenting patently untrue claims as fact severely weakens its stance on the issue. Of course, coming out in favor of punishing sex traffickers is hardly a controversial stance, so it’s likely the editorial didn’t receive a thorough vetting before publication. But letting this slip through compromises the paper’s credibility and accepting Rep. Poe’s “statistics” as fact indicates DMN is in possession of a faulty BS-detector, something no serious journalistic entity should ever let fall into disrepair.
According to the United States Politicians: In Houston alone, about 300,000 sex trafficking cases are prosecuted each year.
(Dallas Morning News Editorial: Cracking down on sex traffickers). [Update: The DMN corrected its error.]
The number is such obvious nonsense that anyone who gave it any serious thought would decry it. (Amy Alkon and Walter Olson got there before me.) But the Dallas Morning News blithely published it as fact.
In Harris County, according to Texas Office of Court Administration statistics, 2,65036,862 new felony cases were filed and 5,819 68,142 new misdemeanor cases were filed in 2012.1 So the total of all new cases filed in Harris County is nowhere near the 300,000 sex trafficking cases asserted by the Dallas Morning News.
According to the Harris County District Clerk’s website, there hasn’t been a prosecution for sex trafficking in Houston since 2010. But when people say “sex trafficking,” they may mean “compelling prostitution.” There have been twocompelling-prostitution cases filed in Harris County this year.
Not 300,000. Two.
There are federal prosecutions as well. Statistics are not as handy,2 but I have a feel for what’s going on in the federal courthouse, and the DOJ loves putting out press releases. The number of people prosecuted for sex trafficking in the Southern District of Texas each year is in the double digits.
Here’s where I think the wide-eyed nincompoops at the Dallas Morning News got their number:
Poe, a Republican from Humble, said sex trafficking rings prey on the large number of immigrant women and girls living in the Houston area and across Texas, accounting for a disproportionate share of the estimated 300,000 sex trafficking cases prosecuted each year.
Nobody seems to know where that 300,000 number comes from. (Maggie McNeill suggests a plausible genesis here and here.) It’s a couple of orders of magnitude less obviously wrong than the same number attributed to Houston, but still glaringly obviously wrong—if the wrongness of “300,000 sex-trafficking cases in Houston” were equivalent to getting smacked upside the head with a 2X4, “300,000 sex-trafficking cases in the United States” would be getting poked in the arm with a fork.
The population of the United states is 314 million, give or take. The population of Texas is 26 million, give or take. For Texas to have a “disproportionate share of the estimated 300,000 sex trafficking cases prosecuted each year,” Texas would have to have more than 24,8403 sex trafficking prosecutions every year.
In 2010, there were 91,047 people prosecuted in federal court. All told. Nationwide. If that number is still about right (and I suspect that federal prosecutions have dropped, rather than increasing, since 2010, given Congress’s laudable inability to keep the government running), even if federal prosecutors were prosecutingnothing but sex trafficking offenses4, for there to be 300,000 sex trafficking cases prosecuted nationwide each year state courts would have to prosecute 210,000 such cases. For Texas’s share of these 210,000 prosecutions to be “disproportionate” Texas would have to prosecute 17,389 sex-trafficking cases each year.
In Texas, statewide, there were 15,629 203,471 criminal cases of all types filed last year in district court;5 of these, 2,723 were misdemeanors and 45,163 were felonies not classified into categories that are recognizably not sex trafficking (murder, theft, etc.).
In Texas, statewide, there were 32,991 415,436 misdemeanor cases filed in 2012 in county court; of these, 116,307 were not classified into categories that are recognizably not sex trafficking (DWI, drug offenses, etc.)
So even if every crime charged in Texas that was not classified as something recognizably not sex trafficking were a sex trafficking crime,6 there would only have been 161,470 sex-trafficking cases filed last year in Texas—nowhere near the 300,000 promoted by the DMN.
Texas is less populous than California, but it has the world’s longest stretch of border between a first-world country and a third-world country. Texas’s economy is humming along while California’s is faltering. It would surprise me if Texas didn’t have more sex-trafficking cases than its population alone dictated.
But 300,000? Utter and complete nonsense.
Those numbers seem low to me, given the crowds in the courthouse lobbies but I think the source can be trusted.My search-fu was defective. ↩- The bureau of justice statistics is eight years behind. ↩
- Give or take. ↩
- A ludicrous proposition—Alkon has BJS statistics:
Federally funded human trafficking task forcesopened 2,515 suspected incidents of human trafficking for investigation between January 2008 and June 2010.
Most suspected incidents of human trafficking were classified as sex trafficking (82%)…
- All but 216 were felonies. ↩
- A ludicrous proposition. ↩
By Mark Bennett
Article Link:
http://blog.bennettandbennett.com/2013/11/dallas-morning-news-credulity-incredibility.html
Human Trafficking Statistics, Facts, number of victims of sex trafficking, prostitution, sex slavery, myths, lies, truth 
American law enforcement now get federal pork bloating dollars to manufacture faulty and inflammatory statistics.
Thanks for supplying these well put together knowledge.