La Crosse is a city of approximately 50,000 residents in western Wisconsin, near the Minnesota border and about midway between Madison, Wisconsin and Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Prostitution has been a documented problem in this city since the mid 1800s.  More contemporary cases of prostitution have been reported in the community since the late 1970s, and in more recent years, numerous cases of child and adult sex trafficking.

To address these longstanding problems, responses of the La Crosse Police Department have included reverse sting operations in an effort to combat demand for commercial sex that drives both prostitution and sex trafficking.  For example, in August 2012, La Crosse police posted a decoy internet ad and placed an undercover team in a hotel.  Over a three and one-half hour period, five men who offered to pay for sex with a police decoy were arrested.  The names and ages of the men were released to the media.

In October 2012, one of the five johns who pleaded guilty was fined $505.  A month later,  another of the five arrestees was offered an opportunity to have his case he complied with a diversion agreement.  The man pleaded guilty at La Crosse County Circuit Court to misdemeanor prostitution, but the charge would be dismissed in one year if he paid a fine, completed 25 hours of community service, wrote an essay about what he learned, and avoided arrest. In November 2012, media outlets reported that two of the men arrested during the sting had been offered diversion agreements that included mandatory individual and group treatment therapy (via the Appleton John School). If the men were to violate the terms of their diversion agreements, they may face up to nine months in jail and/or a $10,000 dollar fine.