Republican North Carolina Rep. Pat Harrigan partnered with Safe House Project to announce on Tuesday the launch of Simply Report — a free, first of its kind mobile app designed to modernize the fight against human trafficking.
Simply Report’s release comes just weeks after 41 State Attorney Generals wrote a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. claiming the National Human Trafficking Hotline service was not adequately delivering hotline tips to local law enforcement. Safe House Project, a non-profit organization that fights against child sex trafficking, has for years been working on developing the app to supplement the hotline in the modern digital age.
“The National Human Trafficking Hotline had long been an integral part of our work, until it was discovered a few years ago that the organization awarded the grant to run the Hotline, Polaris, was no longer sharing tips from concerned citizens and distressed family members with local law enforcement,” the letter states. “Without those tips, our law enforcement loses critical leads to dismantling trafficking operations. We also lose valuable leads to rescuing the victims of trafficking and helping them begin the road to recovery.”
Simply Report allows users to anonymously report suspected human trafficking in real time. The app uses filters to vet tips and ensure credible leads are given to authorities. It also connects survivors and witnesses to Safe House Project’s nationwide network of safe houses and certified care providers. Simply Report is available on both the Apple App Store and Google Play.
“This means no more black hole, no more overwhelmed officers staring at a wall of main tips, no more guessing,” Kristi Wells, the CEO of Safe House Project, said at a Tuesday press conference. “But just as importantly, if a survivor reaches out and says, I need help, they’re connected to the safe house Project Support Team, a specialist, people ready to connect them to safe shelter, trauma, informed care, legal assistance and medical support they need to begin with their life and recover.”
Harrigan told the Daily Caller News Foundation he has been following Safe House Project’s work for years and wanted to join the organization’s effort because of its “bottom line impact.”
“They really make a difference,” the lawmaker said. “They have transformed the North Carolina human trafficking paradigm. They have provided law enforcement with new resources that didn’t exist before. They’ve provided survivors with a place to get out of the situation they’re in and start healing, and now they’re replicating that across the country.”
Simply Report is available in over 200 languages, making it accessible to people worldwide.
“Every day in this country, someone is doing something that doesn’t sit right. Maybe it’s a teenage girl in a hotel lobby that never makes eye contact. Maybe it’s a young man who is terrified when someone else is controlling a conversation, or a pattern of cars coming and going late at night in the same house,” Wells said. “If people see something, they don’t know what to do next.”
Chief Jarryd Rauhoff of the Biscoe, North Carolina Police Department, used his extensive background in fighting human trafficking in the state to detail how important it is to have accurate, streamlined information.
“I’ve seen firsthand how hidden and complex this crime can be. Human Trafficking doesn’t just happen in big cities or along major highways. It happens in our rural towns and our neighborhoods and sometimes even in the places we least expected,” Rauhoff said. “We’ve had calls come in too late. We’ve had tips pass along without enough detail to follow up on. We’ve had survivors wait on hold for 30 to 45 minutes, long enough to decide it’s not worth it. We’ve had breakdowns in communication that meant local agencies like mine didn’t even know when something was happening in our own backyard. That’s unacceptable.”
“Simply Report is not just another tool, it’s the right tool at the right time,” the police chief added.
Human trafficking survivors like Audrey Morrissey, executive director of My Life, My Choice and advisor to the Department of State’s U.S. Council on Human Trafficking, played a significant role in the creation of the app.
“This app is powerful, not because it’s flashy, but because it’s practical. It empowers everyday people to act. It gives law enforcement the credible things they need, and also helps open the doors for survivors to find safety and healing much sooner,” Morrissey said at the press conference. “We are launching a movement to end trafficking in the U.S. by 2030.”
Harrigan told the DCNF that human trafficking within our own borders is a crucial aspect of national security and is part of the reasons voters elected President Donald Trump for a second term.
“We saw that the American people believed we weren’t doing so well [in November]. We needed to secure our southern border and part of that is from a cartel perspective- a drug perspective. The other part of it is from human trafficking,” Harrigan said. “They are kind of bedfellows with one another. You don’t really find one without finding the others, and the exploited in that middle territory, the human trafficking piece, is often American citizens. We have to be cognizant of that. We have to take care of our fellow American citizens first.”
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