Greenacres is a city of approximately 32,000 residents, located in Palm Beach County in southeast Florida. Prostitution activity has been reported locally for at least two decades, and has brought with it a wide range of collateral crimes and led to community complaints.  For example, in 2016 a man had his 2-year-old son with him when he solicited an undercover sheriff’s deputy for sex during a reverse sting operation in Greenacres. The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that the man was one of 21 men arrested on prostitution charges during the operation.  The man was charged with child neglect for having the toddler with him when he was accused of soliciting prostitution. In a separate case in May, 2016, a Greenacres man received five life sentences for sex trafficking both adult and child victims.

Local law enforcement currently incorporate tactics aimed at reducing demand for commercial sex, and have done so since least 1990. In December of that year, for example, the Greenacres Department of Public Safety conducted a street-level reverse sting using an undercover policewoman, which yielded the arrests of 10 male sex buyers. Their names were not publicized in press. September, 2016 marked a renewed effort to curtail demand, as officers with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office announced the arrests of 21 male sex buyers in the aforementioned  following a reverse sting in Greenacres. All of the offenders’ names, hometowns, ages and the charges levied against them were released by select media outlets. Another 11 sex buyers were arrested during a reverse sting in October 2018 in Greenacres, and some news outlets posted the identities of those arrested.