Riviera Beach is a city of approximately 37,000 residents located just north of West Palm Beach in Palm Beach County, Florida. Community members and city officials have reported problems with prostitution in the city for several decades, often linking commercial sex sales to local drug trafficking markets.  Prostitution-related homicides and aggravated assaults specifically targeted toward prostituted persons have also been documented in Riviera Beach.

Like many departments in Palm Beach County, the Riviera Beach Police Department began systematically targeting sex buyers in the early 1980s. RBPD officers conducted their first known reverse sting in April 1980 with the support of the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. The street-level operation, which employed an undercover policewoman as a decoy prostituted woman, resulted in the arrest of 33 sex buyers over the course of two days. Their names were not disclosed. Following the investigation, a representative from the RBPD told The Palm Beach Post that officers decided to undertake the operation after they discovered that prostituted women “who operated in the area(s) where [previous] arrests were made” had merely “shifted [their activities] to another area.”

Perhaps for this reason, Riviera Beach police collaborated with members of the West Palm Beach and Lake Worth Beach Police Departments to conduct two large-scale reverse stings in December 1990 and January 1993. In both instances, RBPD officers conducted street-level reversals in the city, while officers from neighboring departments conducted similar sex buyer sweeps in parallel. Again, the men’s names were not released to the public.

Since 1992, Riviera Beach has also been linked to three separate cases of violence against prostitutes. In May 1992, a prostituted woman was shot and killed by an unknown assailant after the individual saw the woman receive cash ($20) for sex from a sex buyer and attempted to rob her. In the spring of 2012, two prostituted women (ages 20 and 23) were shot as part of a “drive-by shooting spree” targeting transsexual prostitutes in the area. In January 2013, a prostituted woman from Riviera Beach was murdered “and almost beheaded” by a sex buyer in Lake Park, who “picked her up on the street and propositioned her for oral sex.” The murder allegedly occurred after the two argued over prescription drugs.