Hundreds Of Johns Arrested In Sex-Trafficking Sting That Culminated On Super Bowl Sunday

As the New England Patriots were celebrating their thrilling Super Bowl XLIX win Sunday night, law enforcement around the nation were observing a more somber victory.



At least 570 would-be sex buyers (or johns) and 23 so-called sex traffickers -- men taken into custody on charges of pimping, trafficking or promoting prostitution -- were taken off the streets in the "National Day Of Johns Arrests" effort, Illinois' Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart announced Monday.



The nationwide sex-trafficking sting operation, led by the Cook County Sheriff's Department, ran from Jan. 15 to Feb. 1.



“Sex trafficking continues to destroy countless lives, and this broad national movement should send a strong message to prospective johns that their ‘hobby’ is much more than a ‘victimless’ crime,” Dart said in a statement. “It‟s particularly meaningful that this sting culminated on the day of the Super Bowl, which unfortunately has emerged as a prominent haven for sex trafficking."



Experts like Bradley Myles, CEO of the anti-trafficking organization Polaris Project, have noted "there isn't much evidence linking the Super Bowl to a major rise in trafficking," while others point out that sex trafficking is a problem that persists not only during the Super Bowl, but year-round in communities of all sizes.



"We're trying to raise awareness best we can," Cook County Sheriff spokesman Ben Breit told The Huffington Post, explaining that the timing of the sting is largely symbolic. "Tying it to the Super Bowl is the a helpful way to accomplish that."



Dart's office started the first such operation in 2011. The 2015 installment is the largest yet, comprising roughly 70 jurisdictions in 17 states, including Nevada, Arizona and Massachusetts.



On Monday, the Cook County Sheriff's office said 54 women and 14 juveniles nationwide were "rescued" (taken into custody but connected with mental health, drug abuse, domestic abuse and other services).



Other highlights of the operation included Phoenix police recovering several women who said they had been trafficked in for the Super Bowl. Cincinnati police also arrested a pair of sex traffickers who had been using public computers at a local library to post prostitution ads online, according to a release. Las Vegas Police, meanwhile, took a man into custody who was facing federal human trafficking charges in Ohio; they also arrested a john on probation for rape.



The majority of the busts were made through "dates" arranged on the classified ad site, Backpage.com (and to a lesser extent, Craigslist). Dart said Backpage.com has for years been known as the leading online marketplace for prostitution, bringing in millions of dollars a month. Backpage's exact revenue is unknown, but in 2013, classifieds analyst company AIM Group estimated Backpage's take was $4.2 million in a single month.



Dart acknowledges his anti-trafficking and prostitution efforts have their critics -- primarily people who think law enforcement are merely criminalizing a transaction that should have long ago been legalized. But whether the crime is called sex trafficking, pimping or prostitution, Dart says he sees "no distinction."



"That's always been a tough one for me," Dart told The Huffington Post. "How is it any different when a man who gives a woman food or shelter, or coerces her with drugs or abuse, than when someone is brought in from outside the country.'"



And while Dart concedes there are some women who engage in sex work of their own choosing and without the involvement of a pimp, he says such instances are rare -- and still unsafe.



He says the next step is to continue expanding the operation to include more law enforcement agencies in more states.



"Its all about building awareness, about staying on the problem," Dart said. "There's no silver bullet for this."



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Here's What The People Delivering Your Instacart Groceries Really Think

In today's app economy, part-time work just isn't what it used to be.



Once upon a time, a part-time job at a supermarket would have meant spending hours behind a cash register. These days, a part-time grocery job could mean spending hours in your car waiting for an order to come in -- and not necessarily getting paid for that time.



As Instacart, a grocery delivery app that pairs customers with personal shoppers, continues to increase in popularity, some employees at the much-hyped startup are speaking out about what it's really like to do their jobs. Their experiences raise a number of questions about what the future holds for increasingly popular apps that offer on-demand services, from car rides to vacation rentals to home cleaning.



Instacart employs 4,000 personal shoppers, who work in 15 cities around the country. Shoppers receive a digital shopping list from customers and then pick out those items at a local grocery store, before showing up at the customer's door with the goods. In return, the shoppers are "compensated based on a formula that factors in the number of orders per shift and the number of items per order," according to a company spokeswoman. "During busy shifts, shoppers can earn $20 or more an hour depending on tips.” The company's website says shoppers "make up to $25 an hour."



When shifts aren't busy, several employees said their minimum hourly base pay was $10, and that their typical hourly pay usually hovered around that figure. Instacart declined to confirm whether it offers base pay, and some Instacart workers told HuffPost they are not offered an hourly guaranteed wage.



“It’s a really strange job, and there are many weeks where you’re just sitting in the car waiting for orders and hoping something comes in, not being paid to be there,” one of Instacart’s personal shoppers, a 24-year-old college dropout based in Chicago, told The Huffington Post in an interview. “But it’s keeping gas in my car. I’m working a job that requires gas that is essentially just paying for my car. It feels like selling my hair to buy a hairbrush.”



The employee, who did not wish to be identified for fear of losing his job with the company, said that during his first week with Instacart, he made about $350 working just three days. At the end of the week, however, he made a mistake on an order and received a negative customer rating, which led to fewer and smaller orders to fill. Because he’d only been working for a few shifts, it took some time for his "shopper score" -- and his pay -- to bounce back. Meanwhile, his better-rated colleagues were getting more lucrative opportunities.



He would have quit months ago, he said, but he needs the money to keep his car, which he uses to get to his other two part-time jobs.



“It feels like I’m playing a video game, except in real life for real money," he said.



Another shopper who worked with the company in Philadelphia for six months last year said the amount of driving required by the gig sometimes meant spending more money on gas than she earned over a five-hour shift making deliveries to neighborhoods and suburbs located more than a half-hour’s drive from her home near Center City. The 31-year-old entrepreneur is no longer with the company.



“For a part-time gig to earn some extra cash, sure, [the pay was fair],” the former shopper, who also did not want to be identified by name, told HuffPost. “Not really for a main source of income because it's minimum wage and very physically and mentally taxing.”



Not all Instacart workers are disenchanted, of course. Another employee in Chicago, a 27-year-old film student and musician who started shopping for Instacart two months ago, told HuffPost he is “overall pretty grateful” for the work. He praised the experience as “kind of fun” -- like being a contestant on the defunct game show “Supermarket Sweep.” He plans to stick around.



“There are days when I’m on point and can see the order, and it’ll be like ‘A Beautiful Mind’ and I can just map out the whole store in my head and know where everything will be,” he said. “Other days, I’m just staring [down an aisle] like, ‘Where is the molasses?’ Those moments to me are the worst because in my mind I feel the clock moving.”



Lace, a 28-year-old performance artist who started working as an Instacart shopper in Houston last year but has since transferred to Los Angeles, also said she "loves" working for the company.



"It's really easy work that pays well," Lace told HuffPost.



The worst part, she said, is dealing with "pushy and demanding" customers who don't tip, even after she lugs heavy items -- like cases of bottled water -- into their homes. When Instacart shoppers order multiples of the same heavy item, like cases of water or bags of cat litter, the company formula still counts those as "one" item, shoppers explained. As a result, getting the order to the customer's house doesn't always come with a bulk-order bonus.



"Some complain about the price of produce, then you get to their place and they live in a giant mansion in the hills," Lace added. "Catering to every whim of the upper crust, when you're just trying to hustle through your shift, can be aggravating, but we do our best."



Sunil Raman, a general manager at Instacart, told HuffPost that the company's data on the continued activity of its shopper fleet indicates that most shoppers are happy with the gig.



"There are bound to be bumps in the road, but we’re really working hard to help our shoppers along the way," Raman said.



Scrolling through dozens of Instacart worker reviews on Glassdoor.com, a site that lets people post anonymous reviews and salary information about companies, some common themes emerge: People posting on the site described being happy with the flexible scheduling, a high level of autonomy and a relatively relaxed work environment. Other posters complained about sometimes-unpredictable pay and the isolation of spending most of a work shift alone, as well as the financial stress of paying for a vehicle, gas, tolls and smartphone -- the engine that powers it all.



Arun Sundararajan, a professor at New York University who has been dubbed the “go-to expert” on the so-called sharing economy, said the conditions are ripe for a company like Instacart to expand rapidly, as on-demand apps continue to grow in popularity. (The sharing economy, for the uninitiated, describes an emerging business category catering to individuals who rent or borrow goods, such as cars or apartments, instead of buying them.) Instacart also sees greater odds for success thanks to the availability of apps and smartphones that use GPS, technologies that weren't in people's pockets when dot-com flameouts like Kozmo and Webvan attempted grocery delivery and failed.



“It’s very easy for someone to get a GPS-enabled smartphone, so your labor pool is potentially huge, and the technology in the stores has also become far more amenable to this,” Sundararajan said. “The click-and-collect model of how we buy stuff has become increasingly possible because of all of this.”



Still, the success of a company like Instacart ultimately depends on the quality of service offered by its workers, the vast majority of whom are independent contractors who do not earn health insurance, vacation days or paid sick leave. Instacart's full-time employees -- developers, managers and sales reps, for example -- do enjoy such benefits, but there are only about 100 of these positions at the company.



Sundararajan argued that this business model is risky for Instacart and other firms like it because it hands over so much control to workers who don't feel particularly invested in the company's overall health. Workers have detailed similar experiences at other rapidly growing apps, Uber and HomeJoy among them.



Sundararajan suggested that a company like Instacart consider, at minimum, pairing newbie shoppers with expert mentors when they are starting out.



“Eventually these companies’ brand comes from consistent high quality, and that rests almost entirely in the hands of freelance workers,” Sundararajan said. “It’s simply smart capitalism to have a healthy workforce of people motivated to work for you.”



Raman, the Instacart manager, told HuffPost the company does "try to incorporate feedback [from shoppers] into all the improvements we make in the business.”



He said the company formed a "shopper happiness" team late last year, which provides support to workers through a shopper hotline that's available 18 hours a day. The team is also responsible for shopper roundtables to inform how the company's software is designed, as well as shopper parties and other get-togethers.



Hunter Stuart contributed to this story from New York.



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Lessons from 'Selma'

Selma is an outstanding film that vividly portrays the frightening experiences and personal sacrifices made by civil rights activists in their quest to defend voting rights for Blacks in the South. The film reminds us that the movement was complicated and, at times, very ugly. Black and white people were beaten and killed to defend the right to vote. After seeing Selma, it is even harder for me to conceive how voting rights could be successfully limited in some states and how there are Black people who still refuse to vote.



This year marks the 50th anniversary of passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While this anniversary is something to be proud of, recent events make it very sobering. In last week's State of the Union address, President Obama told Congress, "We may go at it in campaign season, but surely we can agree that the right to vote is sacred and that it's being denied to too many."



The president is right. Nearly half the country -- 22 states to be exact -- have passed laws in the last few years that make it harder to vote. These critical setbacks have been met with grassroots pushback and legal challenges in the courts. While the contemporary assaults on voting rights may not be as overt as they were in 1965, we must fight them with the same unwavering resistance as the generations before us.



We owe it to those who paved the way, to ourselves and to the generations that will follow to get registered, get engaged and get out the vote in every election. There is power in the vote. We saw that power played out in Selma when it was revealed that, after passage of the Voting Rights Act, Blacks, who made up the majority of Selma and Dallas County, voted out the racist sheriff Jim Clark who played a key role in the Bloody Sunday violence. Change can happen when you vote.



The 2014 unrest in Ferguson, Missouri will forever be an example of what can happen when we don't have our voices heard at the polls. In the predominately Black suburb, low voter turnout resulted in a predominately white city government and police force that was disconnected and insensitive to the needs of the community. In the aftermath of the Michael Brown tragedy, voter groups flooded Ferguson to get people registered. Will Ferguson residents unhappy with city government, law enforcement and the prosecutor's handling of the Brown case vote for change on their next Election Day? Let's hope so.



Despite our challenges in other areas, Illinois has one of the strongest set of voter protections in the nation. It is easy to get registered and cast your vote in every election. Yet we still have a tendency to disengage when it comes to actually demonstrating our power at the polls. We have a mayoral election on February 24 that must not be missed. My equest to anyone who is thinking of sitting this important election out is to see Selma and be reminded that the right to vote was paid for in blood, sweat and tears. We must vote and we must advocate for voting rights in communities where they have been limited.



Selma has been nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and I hope it wins. While the film was snubbed in the Best Director and Best Actor categories, it will forever remain a powerful example of how the art form of film can educate, inspire and engage us. Because we believe in the importance of presenting films that stir one's conscious and motivates conversation, we will for the fourth year in a row, present a Black History Month film festival that will feature documentaries that address issues including the use of the "N-word," Black male disenfranchisement, gun violence, mental illness and youth homelessness. All films will be shown at the Chicago Urban League for free followed by panel discussions. More information can be found on at http://ift.tt/1qbjbG9. We hope you will join us and bring friends.



If you have not seen Selma yet please make sure you do. It is an important film that serves up a powerful tribute to our past and gives us many lessons that can empower us today and inspire the future. Let's not allow these lessons to go unheard and the contemporary calls to protect the right to vote go unanswered. The path to progress begins with you and me.



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Chef Teaches Inmates At Cook County Jail How To Cook, How To Live

When it comes to getting a fresh start in life, a jail is probably just about the last place that comes to mind — particularly one as large and with as storied a past as Illinois' Cook County Jail.



But a new beginning is exactly what’s being served up these days in Division 11. Bruno Abate, chef and owner of Tocco, a popular Italian restaurant in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, has been teaching a cooking class to inmates.



The class, which began last spring, isn’t just about cooking up a perfectly crispy pizza or a zesty marinara. Rather, Abate says the program aims to educate its participants in professionalism and responsibility, and to give them hope for their life beyond the cell -- hope that they can secure employment, many of them through Abate’s restaurant, and avoid returning to jail.



“I’m trying to teach them the simple life, that you always have the chance to start again,” the Naples, Italy native told The Huffington Post. “You made a mistake, but this country is a good country to start again as long as you’re strong and you fight for the freedom to make a change in your life.”



Abate, who has lived in Chicago since 1998 and opened Tocco in 2009, starts the program with lessons in food safety and sanitation before moving onto classes centered on nutrition, fresh pasta, pizza, cooking with fresh herbs, baking bread and more. When it comes to utensils that could be used as weapons, namely knives, the implements are tethered to the table when in use and stored in lockboxes when they aren't.





Chef Bruno Abate.




The program generally runs about three months, during which Abate comes into the jail two or three times week for a few hours at a time.



Ben Breit, spokesman for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, said Abate’s work has had a tremendous impact on many of the participants, who are carefully chosen from a pool of applicants who interview for the opportunity. Those who are selected, Breit said, are inmates who are “serious about rehabilitation and about turning their lives around.”



For the first round of the program, almost 70 inmates applied for some 20 spots.



“We’re seeing guys who just become accustomed to the ‘fact’ that they will bounce back and forth between jail and the streets and that’s what their life will be like,” Breit told HuffPost. “This is distilling a sense of hope in these guys that has been really transformative. Sometimes that makes all the difference in the world.”



Abate is not new to bringing his culinary prowess to the incarcerated. He previously taught classes at a juvenile detention center in St. Charles, Illinois, and also worked with a Cook County Department of Corrections boot camp. He calls his program Recipe for Change, and he’s done all of it using money out of his own pocket.



But now, Abate is thinking bigger — he wants to redo the jail’s kitchen and buy new equipment that will allow him to expand the lessons he's able to impart. He's hoping for machines that make coffees and cappuccinos, to help improve the students' odds of landing a job at Starbucks or another coffee shop upon their release. A new oven is also necessary, as well as fresh ingredients, cooking supplies and professional chef’s wear for the students.



In order to raise the money he needs and make the program more sustainable, an Indiegogo fundraising campaign was launched in December. To date, Abate’s raised over $4,000 toward a $15,000 fundraising goal. The campaign ends on Feb. 13, prior to the program beginning again with a new group of participants.



“Bruno really took a financial hit [to do this],” Breit said. “He really believes this is just a service he wants to provide to our community, helping these guys turn their lives around.”



Abate’s isn’t the only vocational program taking place in Division 11, a medium-security unit. Other programs include a barber shop training program helmed by Larry Roberts of Larry’s Barber College, a guitar class and an arts program.



“These programs help some of these guys tap into skills they never knew they had,” Breit added.



In addition to helping the inmates learn valuable workforce skills, Abate says he’s also taken away some important lessons from his work at the jail. And food has been the catalyst of it all.



“Through them, I make my life better. Not many people understand it, but when you do something good for other people, you do something good for yourself,” Abate said. “Every day I learn something, every day they give me the power and the energy to go on in life. Every day is a learning lesson.”





Chef Bruno Abate sits down with participants in his class.




Want to read more from HuffPost Taste? Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Tumblr. Local hero hopes to help inmates get jobs, one ravioli at a time.



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Jump-Roping Little Girls Know How To Drop Some Serious Truthbombs About Celebrities

Well, that escalated quickly.



Jump-roping games are apparently not as lighthearted and innocent as they once were. UCB's Los Angeles Digital shows us a group of little girls who are far more culturally savvy and knowledgable about the world than their ages would suggest.



And great, as if jump rope wasn't tough enough for us grownups, now the rhymes are getting darker and more complicated, too.











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Midwest Smacked By Historic Snowfall, Basically Shrugs It Off

Ranking Of Colleges With The Most Drug Arrests Per Capita Counts Several SUNY Campuses

A new analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Postsecondary Education shows several campuses in the State University of New York system have some of the nation's highest rates of on-campus drug arrests.



The "Drugs On Campus" report by Project Know, a website that provides information about getting help for drug addictions, analyzed drug and alcohol arrests and disciplinary actions on campuses in 2013, the most recent data available. Project Know limited its analysis to colleges with at least 5,000 students.



SUNY New Paltz had the No. 1 per capita rate of students with drug arrests on campus -- 13.9 per 1,000 students, or 105 on-campus drug arrests in 2013. The school was No. 107 in 2012, with 24 on-campus drug arrests.



"The safety of our students is top priority," New Paltz spokeswoman Melissa Kaczmarek said in a statement. "As such, we are not surprised by this data, as it is well-known that New Paltz has restrictive policies with respect to drug use/possession."



Kaczmarek added that the school has a low rate of recidivism "thanks to community policing, strict enforcement and intervention/prevention education. There is never a drug citation on campus without a concomitant judicial action where it is made clear that offenders are putting their education at risk."



The university did not respond to a question about why there were so many more arrests in 2013 than in 2012.







Eight of the top 50 schools with the highest rate of drug arrests per capita fall in the 64-campus SUNY system.



School officials say part of the reason that there are so many on-campus arrests may be that each university campus has an actual police force.



“On each of these campuses, for example, we are fortunate to have University Police forces exclusively patrolling the campus, while many other public and private institutions rely solely on local law enforcement agencies," SUNY Police Commissioner Bruce McBride said. "Having a dedicated, community-oriented police department located right on campus likely results in our officers discovering or being called to incidents of recreational drug use more frequently."



McBride said the SUNY numbers may not be "a true reflection of the amount of drug use happening on our campuses in comparison to others nationwide."



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