Sponsored By. He asks what brought her to town. She sits at the foot of the bed. He sets his cash on the dresser and stands nervously in front of her. Get on the ground! Lay down! The sting led to the john's arrest, one of four sex solicitation cases charged in Cass County District Court last year.
Fargo police Lt. Joel Vettel said the department doesn't keep statistics on the number of stings conducted and how many arrests results from each, but it's rare that an arrest isn't made, he said. When arrests are made in prostitution stings, the department usually issues a news release to the media - the only Class B misdemeanor crime to receive such publicity on a regular basis, which speaks to the emphasis that police put on curbing the sex trade here.
Only a handful of prostitution cases are charged in Cass County every year. Four women were charged with prostitution in , two in , three each in and , five in and six so far this year. A total of eight johns were charged during the same period, with the highest total for a single year being four in Two have been charged so far this year. Fargo police employ a variety of tactics during the stings that lead to many of the prostitution cases, as seen in videos - obtained by The Forum newspaper through an open records request - of stings targeting suspected prostitutes and johns.
Vettel said police walk "a fine line" in determining what undercover prostitutes and johns - most of them law enforcement officers, some not - can do during stings. Police have reviewed past court rulings and work with the state's attorney's office to set guidelines, he said.
Entrapment is often a defense in prostitution cases if police are inducing someone to commit a crime when they otherwise wouldn't be predisposed to it, said Fargo defense attorney Mark Friese. If police violate the law in order to make arrests or obtain convictions, a court may dismiss the criminal charge based on due process grounds that the conduct rises to the level of outrageousness, he said.
