The insidious crime of human trafficking produces 25 million victims globally each year, according to an American Gaming Association report. While it might seem like casinos, with high-tech surveillance systems and security personnel, would be immune from human trafficking, that’s not the case.
“This problem is so pervasive, I would represent that any casino with a hotel, you’ve had human trafficking or you have human trafficking,” said Firekeepers Casino Vice President of Security and Surveillance George Jenkot. “You just haven’t realized it yet.”
Jenkot spoke last week during the SBC webinar “Human Trafficking Within the Gambling Sphere: What Your Casino Can Do,” a collaboration with Vector Solutions. The session was moderated by Kinectify Director of Business Development Sean Topchi.
Calling the crime “a modern-day form of slavery,” David Vialpando, executive director of the Pokagon Band of the Potawatomi Gaming Commission, said human traffickers “profit from either the labor or providing of sex services of other individuals. And within the casino environment, what we typically find is sex trafficking.”
Vialpando stated that each year, there approximately 300,000 new victims of human trafficking in the U.S. And while immigrants are victimized, most victims in this country are U.S. citizens.
Traffickers’ target “people who are homeless, chemically dependent, runaways, kids who feel that they don’t fit in with their cohorts, economically challenged individuals, such as single female parents, those who feel isolated from society, and that’s by design,” Vialpando said. “Traffickers have honed their recruitment strategies over many many years and they have the ability to identify those who are vulnerable.”
When the Pokagon Band was building out a section of its New Buffalo, Michigan, casino three years ago, the tribe increased employee-awareness training about the signs of human trafficking. Using resources from the Department of Homeland Security’s Blue Campaign and the National Indian Gaming Commission, the casino shared information with nearly 3,000 employees and tribal police. Employees are instructed not to intercede, but to observe and report possible incidents.
“It’s human nature to say I want to rescue that person,” Vialpando said. “And we’re asking them not to do that. We want you to observe. We want you to report, because approaching a suspected trafficking victim and trying to rescue them out of the lifestyle is rarely successful. They feel like they can’t leave. They feel like this is their life for the rest of their life and they can’t escape. So even law enforcement has difficulty luring those victims out of that lifestyle. It takes professionals to do that.”
Jenkot said trafficking victims are usually minimized and overshadowed by their captors. When in a casino, they tend to let traffickers speak for them. Traffickers also have a victim’s ID when asked for identification.
“It’s the beginning of a red flag and this should cause you to become aware when a person isn’t presenting their own ID or this person is not handling their own business,” Jenkot said. “This person is being handled, so it’s pretty likely that they’re being trafficked with that information.”
Jenkot also said that trafficking can take place anywhere on an operator’s property. He recently spoke to a colleague in Arizona whose staff noticed a young woman not wearing shoes as she walked from a pool area to the hotel. When the woman was told she had to wear shoes, she immediately stepped behind and deferred to a man accompanying her. It was eventually determined the woman was being trafficked and tribal police were called.
“It’s really important to understand that although you can’t take every individual sign as a testimony that (trafficking) is taking place,” Jenkot said, “it’s important to be sensitive to small signs, because they lead to bigger things if you start paying attention.”