Corona is a city of approximately 160,000 residents, situated south of Riverside near Yorba Linda in Riverside County, California. The Corona Police Department has staged many street-level reverse stings, and has engaged in some web-based reverse stings as well. Sex buyers have been arrested and warned about the risks of soliciting sex with people engaged in prostitution.

In 2003, CPD officers reported that they had at times conducted reverse stings as often as once per week to catch men soliciting prostituted persons on their city’s streets, and that complaints from businesses and residents frequently drove the force’s anti-prostitution operations. In November 2013, a reverse sting was conducted between noon and 11 p.m. in a hotel near Maple Street and SR-91. During the sting, 20 men were arrested for buying sex after answering Internet ads that police had posted. For several months prior to the reversal, the Corona Police Department’s Vice, Narcotics and Intelligence Unit had been addressing community concerns about prostitution. Business owners complained about prostituted women loitering and men soliciting sex acts from them in areas that interfered with their businesses. Female residents also complained about men soliciting them for sex as they walked to and from their homes. The Corona Police Department said it would continue to conduct operations in the city, including those targeting sex buyers. The details of the operations were reported to the media, but no effort was made to publicize the men’s identities.

In February 2020, the results from the statewide “Operation Reclaim and Rebuild” were announced. The week-long operation was led by the Los Angeles Regional Human Trafficking Task Force and involved 70 participating federal, state and local law enforcement agencies (including the Corona Police Department) and task forces from across California. In addition to recovering and serving victims of sex trafficking and arresting then prosecuting their traffickers, Operation Reclaim and Rebuild also sought to disrupt the demand for vulnerable victims by targeting their buyers. Investigators focused enforcement operations wherever the trafficking of human beings took place and included street-level and internet-based operations. The operation deployed specially trained cyber detectives who posed as vulnerable teenagers and interacted with suspects on social media (i.e., traffickers, and buyers who sought to exploit and sexually abuse children). Operation Reclaim and Rebuild resulted in the arrest of 266 male sex buyers for the charge of solicitation, as well as the recovery of 76 adult and 11 minor victims and the arrest of 27 suspected traffickers. Downloadable Material: Talking Points and Slides