Mississippi school bus and truck drivers will soon receive special training to identify and report signs of human trafficking. Since 2007, there have been more than 500 human trafficking cases in Mississippi according to the Human Trafficking Hotline. Experts say around 1 in 12 jobs in Mississippi are connected to the trucking industry. Attorney General Lynn Fitch says the initiative will expand an existing program with the Mississippi Truckers Association to create a statewide network of eyes and ears to help victims.
Fitch says “This is a full outreach campaign training with all those commercial drivers. Some of them have already been doing it, but how do we do it more forcefully? And how do we do it those several hundred thousand commercial drivers out there to be aware? We’re going to train the school bus drivers. People have to be willing to step in.”
Advocates for victims of human trafficking will help in the training process and teach the state's truckers how to safely and accurately make a report for human trafficking. Sandy Middleton is Executive Director of the Center for Violence Prevention. She says there are many nuanced identifiers that are grounds for reporting a possible case of human trafficking, but anyone can report if they have concerns.
“It’s just intuition that you see something and you think ‘that’s not right. Something’s not right there.’ And so we want the people in the public to pick up the phone and call the human trafficking hotline and make that report and our investigators will look into it,” says Middleton.
Officials say when someone reports a potential human trafficking case, they can do so anonymously and law enforcement officials can begin an investigation.
Mississippi law enforcement officers, truckers and school bus drivers are teaming up to identify and report signs of human trafficking.
