Auburn is a city of about 14,000 residents in Placer County, California, and is included within the greater Sacramento metropolitan area, to the northeast. The Auburn Police Department has made numerous prostitution arrests over the years and fielded numerous complaints from residents about prostitution activity.  The city and others in the county and Sacramento region also has substantial documented sex trafficking activity.

To address prostitution and sex trafficking, the Auburn Police Department has conducted reverse stings, and has collaborated with the Placer County Sheriff’s Office and Roseville Police Department on comprehensive operations that have targeted commercial sex buyers, providers, and traffickers.  For example, in December 2018, Auburn Police reported a human trafficking investigation inside city limits resulted in the arrest of eight women on suspicion of prostitution, a man and woman arrested for pimping, and two men arrested on suspicion of soliciting for prostitution. The arrests took place during a two-day operation led by Auburn Police, and included the Placer County Sheriff’s Office special investigations unit, county probation and the California Alcoholic Beverage Control office.  A total of 17 people were contacted during the two-day operation, according to Auburn Police. During one of the operations, a woman was arrested and charged with child endangerment for bringing a small child with her during the course of participating in prostitution.

In February, 2018 a three-city, multi-agency task force operation designed to combat human trafficking resulted in the local arrest of three men, two for pimping and pandering and one for solicitation. The three-day operation on human trafficking, Operation Reclaim and Rebuild, was conducted throughout California, including Lincoln, Rocklin and Roseville, and resulted in 510 arrests statewide, including 178 males arrested for solicitation. In Auburn, one man was arrested for solicitation. A detective of the Auburn Police Department and the Placer County Special Investigations Unit helped organize Operation Reclaim and Rebuild’s local efforts, and said that arrests are made regularly “on the customer side.”

In January 2019, a man was arrested after Placer County Sheriff’s Office say he tried to meet with someone he believed to be a 15-year-old girl for sexual abuse in Auburn.  The man used social media to contact a teen, offering to pay her to sexually abuse her, but the online post was a decoy placed by sheriff’s deputies and detectives.  When the man arrived at the meeting spot he was arrested. His identity was disclosed in news reports.