It is interesting that the Indy media is following Des Moines news.
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Complaints about prostitution in Des Moines have decreased in recent years, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, police said.
Lt. Jeff Edwards leads the police department’s vice and narcotics unit, about 20 people responsible for investigating cases including prostitution. So far in 2012, the unit has made 18 arrests on prostitution charges. Arrests dropped from 54 in 2009 to 30 in 2011.
Complaints from residents are down, Edwards said, but he believes part of the reason is that operations are switching to setting up deals online.
In an arrest operation last Thursday, the Des Moines unit found a 16-year-old girl who’d gone missing from her home in Oregon and was working in a prostitution ring in a Holiday Inn on Sixth Avenue. Such cases underline why prostitution investigations are important, Edwards said.
“A lot of people might argue that prostitution is a victimless crime,” he said. “But the problem that we run into is situations exactly like what we’ve got here, where we’ve got a 16-year-old girl who’s a runaway that somebody is concerned about that’s engaging in this kind of dangerous behavior,” he said.
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In Des Moines, Back- page.com is one of several websites that officers monitor daily, looking especially for prostitution involving underage girls.
But Edwards said that in his experience, the use of a specific website will rise and fall. Just three to four years ago, Craigslist was a main advertising source.
“They started kind of controlling it a little bit better than what they were doing, and everything went to Backpage,” he said. “I expect the same thing is going to happen. People will migrate around on these different websites.”
Prostitution is becoming an online enterprise, Edwards said. Of the cases the unit investigates each week, he estimates 90 percent begin with online advertising.
Prostitution operations are also attracted to Des Moines by the intersection of Interstate Highways 80 and 35. Operations visit Des Moines from the Minneapolis and Omaha areas and often stop on the way to Chicago or Kansas City.
The prevalence of Internet-linked prostitution makes it tougher to build prostitution cases, Edwards said. The barrage of websites, which often run duplicate ads for services, makes it hard to keep tabs on all the operations in the area. “There’s a ton of it out there,” Edwards said. “There’s a whole lot of websites; there’s a lot of ads on each website.”
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Some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
Charles Kingsley