Texas PD’s Massage Parlor Sting Operation Ends With 13 Officers Disciplined, All 23 Criminal Cases Dismissed

Cops like to pretend they’re winning the war on sex trafficking. Whether or not there’s enough sex trafficking to justify law enforcement expenditures is, at best, still an open question. And most sex trafficking operations tend to end with the arrest of the people they’re supposed to be saving: the sex workers.

Then there are the investigations themselves. A bunch of vice cops are given permission to do whatever needs to be done to gather evidence, even if that means further exploitation of the people they’re supposed to be saving. Then there’s the collateral damage, which ranges from civil forfeiture targeting cars driven by people who happen to pass through, um… “high sex areas” to grabbing whatever cash happens to be lying around when officers storm massage businesses.

Then there’s this chain of events, which is as hilarious as it is infuriating. Here’s the only narrative I’m sure the Lewisville, Texas police department wanted to surface following its long-term sting operation against local businesses:

Lewisville Police Chief Brock Rollins said that in October 2022, the former street crimes unit was assigned to uncover alleged prostitution at nine massage parlors in the city, as well as one in neighboring Flower Mound. The operation lasted until June 2024, resulting in 32 criminal charges against 28 suspects.

Oh, if only we could freeze time! What a game changer that would be! This would be victory against sex trafficking, even it’s there’s nothing in here that suggests the 28 “suspects” might have been people being sex trafficked, rather than the traffickers themselves. Best case scenario (if we accept these assertions as true): 28 people were arrested for allegedly participating in consensual sex acts in exchange for money. That’s the best case scenario.

But there’s no best case here. In fact, there are no cases at all! This is literally the next paragraph in CBS’s coverage of this debacle:

However, the Denton County District Attorney’s Office told Rollins they wouldn’t be able to prosecute any of the 23 cases because undercover officers had engaged in “inappropriate physical contact” with suspected prostitutes.

LOL. I haven’t laughed this hard since I paid someone to make me laugh this hard in a transaction involving two consensual adults. Chief Rollins: we have made inroads against the scourge of consensual sex acts in Lewisville. DA’s office: your boys are the problem tho.

In response to having every single case dropped by the DA, the PD opened an internal investigation. The only surprise here is that it found some cops worth disciplining.

Three Lewisville police officers were fired and several others were disciplined after it was found there was “inappropriate touching” between some of the officers and alleged prostitutes they were investigating, authorities said Friday.

An internal affairs investigation was launched into the officers’ conduct, which spanned more than a year, and found that 13 officers had violated one or more of the department’s policies. The violations involved covert officers, a captain and sergeants, along with nearly two dozen prostitution cases that had more than 30 criminal charges against 28 suspects.

Chief Rollins still somehow believes he has the moral upper hand, though. He claims there’s “no evidence” officers had sex with any of the alleged sex workers (presumably because no rape kits or UV lights were deployed during this investigation). He also claims — quite ridiculously — that the entire department shouldn’t be judged by the actions of the 13 officers disciplined and the 54 officers interviewed during the investigation.

“This is not us,” Rollins said. “This is not the Lewisville Police Department. This is not normal activity for us. This is a very small subgroup of employees that ended up in an area of misconduct and we’ve remedied and rectified that.”

But it is you. The LPD only has 188 sworn officers. This means almost a third of those were interviewed and almost 10 percent of them are facing discipline. Since it’s impossible to believe the entire staff of sworn officers was engaged in this prostitution sting, we’re left to assume that most of the officers involved in this operation engaged in inappropriate conduct.

So, it is very much representative of the whole. The only difference is that every single case generated by this operation is being tossed due to officer misconduct. Until the next scandal surfaces, it is entirely logical to assume what’s been observed here is representative of the whole and is not limited to a “very small subgroup” of employees.

There’s no better support for this conclusion than the fact that the PD has yet to inform the public how many officers in total were involved in this operation. Instead, it has merely chosen to point to the total number of sworn officers in hopes of minimizing the impact of seeing nearly 10 percent of its entire force disciplined for misconduct following a single law enforcement operation.

Maybe it’s time for the chief to start asking tough questions of officers angling for vice-related posts. Because we’ve seen enough evidence everywhere else in law enforcement that suggests people who have vices they’d rather satisfy on the public’s dime tend to be drawn to enforcement efforts that will allow them to scratch their particular itches. It’s only the willfully ignorant that pretend uncovering widespread misconduct in operations that lend themselves to abuse is nothing more than stumbling across an anomaly that isn’t reflected elsewhere in the law enforcement agency.