On Wednesday, October 4th, Carroll County Maryland Sheriff’s Office Advocacy and Investigation Center performed a reverse sting operation, on Backpage.com, a website known for its use to solicit and buy sex. As part of the operation, an undercover detective posted an ad with a number to a police cell phone. Three different alleged potential sex buyers called the number later that day.
The first alleged sex buyer, Andrew Douglas Maley, offered to pay $72 and marijuana for forty-five minutes of sexual favors. The second alleged sex buyer, Mingo Bruce Hubbard, agreed to pay $80 for thirty minutes of sexual favors. The final alleged sex buyer, a Pennsylvania resident, Joshua Walter Semon, agreed to pay $60 for a “short stay.” All three defendants were charged with two counts of prostitution. According to court records, Maley and Hubbard were released without bail on their own recognizance, but Semon was held due to an out of state charge stemming from a parole violation from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania which involved endangering the welfare of children. All three men have court dates scheduled for December 8, 2017.
The CSE Institute commends the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office Advocacy and Investigation Center on focusing their investigation on the sex buyers rather than charging the prostituted persons by using a reverse sting tactic. We hope to see more productive and demand-focused investigative work by these offices in order to help combat the true perpetrators of sex trafficking. While these alleged sex buyers are residents of other states, and we do not know their motivation for traveling to Maryland to buy sex, this particular operation shows the importance of multiple jurisdictions working together to eliminate sex trafficking. No one state can prevent sex trafficking alone; the combined efforts of law enforcement across boroughs, counties, and states lines must be unified in order to properly charge and prosecute perpetrators of sexual exploitation and offer support for those victimized by the commercial sex industry.
All views expressed herein are personal to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law or of Villanova University.