Sheriff Grady Judd is still at it.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd loves the spotlight. He’s most famous for his press conferences where he features a poster-board containing the pictures of suspects arrested in one of his “stings”. He’s also famous for coming up with creative names for them.
This one; “Operation Not So Silent Night”. Nifty, right? A play on the holiday season. Except the only one being not so silent is Judd himself, when he gladly speaks to the press about the 114 people he arrested in this “Human Trafficking Sting”.
To people not familiar with Judd’s tactics, to hear a headline claiming that over a hundred people in their county are involved in “human trafficking” must be terrifying. It connotes the image of teenagers being kidnapped and whisked off to other countries where they are sold for sex.
In this case, however, what used to be called “the oldest profession” is now called “human trafficking” as most of the people arrested were prostitutes and “johns”. That didn’t stop the local news reports from touting the human trafficking buzzword or Sheriff Judd holding a press conference at which he went through the arrested’s mugshots one-by-one to further humiliate them, before they were even convicted.
As usual also, the “sting” was conducted by Judd and his team putting up ads on Craigslist and similar sites. Soliciting the crimes.
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Yup – Shady Grady knows how to play the media and the fear driven people. When FL passed this inane law making prostitution trafficking I immediately saw the writing on the wall. The FEDS are making a big deal out of trafficking and so local entities stand to get big funding if they can show that trafficking is big in their area – what better way to do that then to make prostitution trafficking? Waa laa!