Colorado Springs is a city of approximately 416,000 residents, located south of Denver along Interstate 25 in El Paso County, Colorado. Prostitution and sex trafficking are well documented in the city, with 25 underage victims of commercial sexual exploitation and 34 adult victims recovered in Colorado Springs between January and August 2014 alone. There have also been cases of murderers specifically targeting prostituted persons.

To curtail prostitution activity in the city, Colorado Springs police have utilized frequent street-level reverse stings since at least 1980. In the early 1990s, the CSPD conducted a series of large-scale operations targeting sex buyers. The operations, which employed undercover female officers as decoys, resulted in the arrests of dozens of johns.

In July 1994, the Colorado Springs Gazette reported that city law enforcement routinely faxed the names of all arrested johns to the press, but their inclusion was at the discretion of local media outlets. It is unclear if the limited publication of arrestees’ names and identities continues to be largely a press choice.

In recent years, the CSPD diversified its efforts to include stings that target men attempting solicit sex online. In particular, officers have targeted men attempting to purchase sex with minors. Web stings, as they were, have been conducted since at least 2002. Undercover officers have posed as both underage decoys and pimps, advertising sex with a minor on websites suspected to be favored by child predators. As web solicitation often crosses city and county lines, the CSPD has frequently engaged the support of the Colorado Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. The CSPD has similarly collaborated with the Task Force on several investigations into domestic minor sex trafficking in the area.

In spring 2015, Colorado Springs police announced they would begin posting the identities of arrested sex buyers to the department’s Facebook page. Six johns were posted to the site in early April 2015. Another four convicted johns’ identities and arrest photos were publicized in February 2016.

In April 2019, Colorado Springs Police set up a fake Facebook account pretending to be a 16-year-old girl looking for a job.  A man allegedly offered to pay her $120 for sex, and was arrested on suspicion of four child prostitution crimes and one count of obscenity.  The sex buyer had sent three lewd photos of himself to the fictitious profile on Facebook and then texted more photos to the girl, one a full body shot in a mirror with a unique tattoo on his chest. He tried to persuade the fake girl to meet him at a hotel near the Colorado Springs Airport to buy sex.

The Colorado Springs Police Department conducted yet another reverse sting in June 2019 that resulted in the arrest of a man seeking to solicit a minor. As in previous cases, the offender’s information was released to the public in addition to the charges he faces. The operation was conducted at a local hotel where the man was attempting to meet an underage female to engage in prostitution.

In October 2020 a pair of Fort Carson soldiers were among the eight men arrested in a prostitution sting in Colorado Springs.  The suspects had allegedly sought to pay to have sex with children under the age of 18.  All faced felony charges of soliciting for child prostitution.