When officer Joe Brown returned to work at the Charlottesville Police Department after several weeks off, Sergeant Marc Brake noticed a change in the man’s appearance. Brown “had grown a beard, looked kinda scraggly,” according to Brake. Officer Brown’s appearance was a contrast to his clean, efficient skills: “A lot of tactical experience, experience as an investigator and a patrol,” says Brake.
Brown has spent the last five years as a community officer—as Brake puts it, “walking the neighborhoods, interacting with people to find out what they were like.” Overlapping those same five years was an eight year period during which the Charlottesville Police Department had not undertaken a prostitution operation.
This summer, a few months before Brown took his vacation, Fifeville residents began to call the police department to complain about alleged prostitutes in their area. So Brown designed a group of eight officers —a security team to stay close to any arrests, a “tech guy” to wire cars for surveillance, and arrest teams. But he needed a decoy.
“When you look for someone in the department to act as a decoy”—an undercover agent posing as a prostitute or a “John”—”the first thing you look for is someone you won’t recognize,” says Brake. At the end of Joe Brown’s vacation, Brake recognized only that this bearded, scraggly officer was his man.
Brown posed as a “John” between Monday, November 27, and Wednesday, November 29, and personally participated in the arrests of six of the seven prostitutes nabbed in the sweep, dubbed “Operation Hook-up.” The misdemeanor charge carries a maximum sentence of one year in jail, though Captain Chip Harding says that most hookers get probation.
Does probation work? You be the judge. A 55-year-old woman was arrested twice during the same operation. “I’ve seen a couple we’ve arrested this week, and they were walking in the same area where we arrested them,” says Brake.
Brake could not comment on the future of the operation, but says that such efforts always hinge on undercover agents. “We have had males and females play Johns and prostitutes in the past,” Brake says. Fortunately for Brake, average Joe made a great John.
