I saw a public notice recently which was talking about human trafficking. It was explaining some of the signs to watch for and gave the number for a law enforcement agency to report suspected cases to.
But one thing puzzled me. The sign said that you should call and report any suspected cases twice. And it wasn’t to two different agencies; they were saying you should make a duplicate call to the same agency.
Is there some reason for this?
Was it the law enforcement agency itself that put out the announcement, or some other organization?
This is purely speculative on my part, but if it was another organization it might be that the law enforcement agency only follows up on leads that have secondary independent confirmation, and the organization is hoping that they won’t notice the difference if the same person calls twice.
I don’t specifically remember but I believe it was put out by some NGO.
I considered that possibility. But if a law enforcement agency is only following up on reports that have secondary confirmation, that means that they are not following up on reports that only have a single primary report.
And I feel that if there was a law enforcement agency that was receiving reports of human trafficking occurring and was choosing to ignore them, that’s the kind of thing that would explode on the media.
Maybe they look into everything, but two calls affects the priority? But then it really wouldn’t make much sense for anyone to advise you to try to game the system, unless you are absolutely certain that your report should be prioritized over others. Perhaps the resolution to this is that the NGO knows that most calls are hoaxes - “swatting” - and the NGO is assuming that you are genuine.
…can you either link to or give us a name for the NGO?
Because some organizations that campaign against human trafficking that have seriously gone down a rabbit hole of conspiratorial nonsense, and it’s possible that what you have seen may well belong to one of these groups.
This is my thought too, I’d want to know who exactly put out the message before I gave it any credibility at all. Even ostensibly reputable organization like police or sheriff’s departments often put out dubious “public service” statements that are just plain false - often they’re just repeating very old urban legends about women getting abducted from parking lots and so on.
I’m not even sure it was an NGO.