Pinal County receives state anti-human trafficking grant

The Pinal County Board of Supervisors has accepted a more than $400,000 grant from the state to continue to provide law enforcement and prosecutors up-to-date information on anti-human trafficking efforts.

At its Sept. 18 meeting, the supervisors approved allowing the Pinal County Attorney’s Office to accept a $423,241 award from the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs.

PCAO will use the grant in collaboration with the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys’ Advisory Council to help pay for statewide in-person conferences and webinars about anti-human trafficking topics for law enforcement, prosecutorial offices, medical examiners and more.

Pinal County Attorney Kent Volkmer told the supervisors that human trafficking includes sex trafficking and labor trafficking.

“Unfortunately, our proximity to the border, our proximity to Phoenix … where we have Final Fours, where we have Super Bowls, where we have National Championship games, that brings a lot of unsavory characters to our community,” Volkmer said. “The state tries to do a good job of training law enforcement, training prosecutors, but we could always get better because the reality is the bad guys are continuing to evolve and we need to do the same thing.”

Volkmer said the grant money will be used to organize and host conferences for victims’ advocates, prosecutors and training on how to use technology to combat human trafficking.

There will also be conferences focusing on the intersections of drugs, domestic violence and identity theft with human trafficking, Volkmer said.

“The purpose of this grant is to give prosecutors, to give law enforcement, to give those in the criminal justice field the education, the information and the tools necessary to combat this evil,” Volkmer said.

We’d like to invite our readers to submit their civil comments, pro or con, on this issue. Email AZOpinions@iniusa.org. Janet Perez can be reached at jperez@iniusa.org.