Fayetteville is a city of approximately 209,000 residents, located about 60 miles south of Raleigh in Cumberland County, North Carolina. Street prostitution and child sex trafficking have posed considerable problems for the city for decades, with illegal activities frequently concentrated along major roadways leading to and from Fort Bragg, a major U.S. Army installment situated just south of the city. Violence committed against prostituted people in Fayetteville is well documented. For example, in May 2009, a women engaged in prostitution was stabbed in the back five times by a sex buyer, who admitted to previously murdering a prostituted woman in the city. This predation on prostituted people and trafficking victims in Fayetteville is not an isolated case; a serial killer who specifically targeted women offering prostitution was active in the city in the mid-2000s. In 2008, police detectives believe several serial rapists were targeting those sold for sex, and in subsequent years, at least one was captured.

To address the wide range of crimes associated with the local sex trade, the Fayetteville Police Department has conducted street-level reverse stings since at least 1976. In March and April of that year, Cumberland County sheriff’s deputies and FPD officers arrested 71 individuals in the city for prostitution-related offenses, including several armed servicemen. As in many of its early operations, the FPD sent both male and female officers undercover, having them pose as both decoy sellers and buyers.

Although it is unclear when Fayetteville law enforcement formally adopted their identity disclosure policy, local newspapers have run the names and other identifying information of arrested sex buyers since at least 1976. As operations became more frequent, members of the local media began to publicize the full arrest information (including the name, age, and home address) of each offender, suggesting such details were systematically distributed by law enforcement.

In July 1988, nine male sex buyers convicted of soliciting prostitution in Fayetteville were ordered not to loiter in the area where they had were arrested (namely, the U.S. 401 Bypass and Fort Bragg reservation), but it is unclear if these orders came with enforceable penalties if violated (e.g., re-arrest or fining).

Unusually, the city has on at least one occasion opted to dismiss all of the charges brought against individuals arrested during one of its prostitution stings. In August 2002, following a July sting that netted 32 men and women for attempting to buy or sell sex, Fayetteville Police decided to dismiss all of the charges levied against those arrested after “they discovered that an officer from another county was caught in an undercover enforcement operation but not charged. At the time, a FPD officer commented that “[they] didn’t condone selective enforcement in an operation.”  However, that dismissal of charges appears to have been an anomaly rather than a change in policy.  Reverse stings have occurred since, including a January 2017 street-level operation resulting in the arrest of 14 sex buyers, and another in January, 2023, resulting in nine arrests.

Some local arrests of sex buyers are the result of investigating allegations against real victims as opposed to the product of sting operations using police decoys. For example, in February, 2023, a Fayetteville man who paid $340 for nude photos of a young girl and five days of access to her for sexual abuse was sentenced to more than 15 years in federal prison. The offender had pleaded guilty in May 2022 to two counts of receipt of child pornography. Prosecutors said in court that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received tips in 2019 from the social networking platform Tagged about suspected child exploitation. That May, the suspect asked another user on the platform to arrange contact with a girl who was 9 or 10 years old, negotiated a price of $90 for naked photos and $250 for five days of sexual access to her and then sent the money via CashApp.