If slavery is outlawed everywhere, yet the modern slave trade — otherwise known as human trafficking — appears to be on the increase, where are the police?
According to the DCAF Report, the answer is that law enforcement in nation after nation is oftentimes complicit in trafficking, pocketing bribes for looking the other way, “losing” vital travel and citizenship documents, and in some cases actually working directly with criminal elements to facilitate the movement of human beings across national and international borders.
“. . .(T)here is no question that human trafficking could not occur on the scale it does were it not for the complicity and collusion of corrupt officials with criminal gangs,” writes law enforcement expert Leslie Holmes in the DCAF report.
Holmes, who has extensively investigated police-crime relationships in eastern and southern Europe, concedes that the lack of hard data (e.g. corruption prosecutions) limits the ability of governments and law enforcement agencies to gain a clear picture of the extent of police complicity in trafficking. But it is there, he writes, and growing in scope due significantly to the “opportunity” for low-paid border guards, immigration bureaucrats and public prosecutors to get into the action — and quick profits — trafficking in human beings generates. As Holmes frequently reminds readers, trafficking has historically been a low-risk, high reward enterprise with relatively easy entry for unscrupulous individuals (including siblings, parents and relatives of victims). And the reason risk is low, he writes, is that law enforcement in many nations has traditonally turned a blind eye to the growing business of trafficking.
How does corruption play out? Corrupt police can become directly involved by helping create and shield a trafficking scheme or by colluding with traffickers by alerting them to upcoming raids or assisting gangs in regaining control of victims who’ve escaped. Indirectly, police and government officials can aid traffickers simply by refusing to investigate trafficking incidents.
Here’s a description from Holmes’ study of the many ways corrupt police have enabled human trafficking to flourish:








