The Fort Worth Police Department Vice Unit is tasked with policing crimes related to organized gambling operations, electronic file-sharing of child pornography, online solicitation of minors and prostitution-based escort services.

“No week is ever the same,” said Sergeant Westbrook, supervisor of the vice unit.

Westbrook said his unit is small.

"I’m authorized 10 officers and myself, so one supervisor,” he said.

The unit typically works undercover, and it is very hard to even notice them while they are at work.

“Everything we do is covert; we are plain-clothes officers," said Westbrook. "If the unit did their job correctly, the average person on the street would not even know they were there."

In addition to being covert, the unit tries to work as quickly and efficiently as possible. They target high-priority crime.

“We try to go after the people responsible for the crime and not the prostitute working the street because she’s working for somebody else, said Lieutenant Hill. "So, if we can run details that target the boss, then that’s what we try to go after versus what doesn’t matter."

The main goal of Vice is to tackle the illegal deed from within. Their goal is to find the bosses and leaders of these organized crime rings and take them down instead of targeting their workers. A big example of this is the prostitution rings in Fort Worth.

“We try to have breakups and monotony going out and doing street-level prostitution,” said Lieutenant Hill. “We do a lot of gambling. Throughout the year, we organize and incorporate different units for human trafficking details, which we work together to cover every aspect of it,” he said. 

The unit continues to keep Fort Worth safe and clean from illegal organizations. This all comes hidden from the human eye, without citizens noticing their work, and vice would like it to stay that way.

While their day-to-day operations are conducted by the unit alone, large-scale operations require collaboration with various other units in the department and even the local jail.

“I reached out to [Human Trafficking] to make sure that they’re available for a certain weekend, make sure a CTU [Enhanced criminal tracking unit] unit is available so we can have more presence and some takedown officers in case we have a pimp or a trafficker outside,” said Westbrook. “We have to make sure that we talk to any other undercover officers so we can have surveillance throughout the area, just so we know which vehicles are showing up or leaving throughout the process. We try to make sure that the jail is aware in case we have an influx of arrests.”

While this collaborative process may be a lot to undertake, Westbrook said it works well for the department as a whole.

“It may seem like a lot,” said Westbrook, “but it’s something we do fairly regularly, so it's a process where all the supervisors work in good harmony together.”

Westbrook said the compounded efforts of their unit along with others are imperative when executing these large-scale operations.

“If you have one kink in the chain, then everything's going to fall apart,” said Westbrook.

Hill added that the collaborative operations can logistically, “get a little busy,” and close work with other units involved helps streamline the operations.

The vice unit budget has waxed and waned over the last eight years, depending on department reinstatement, personnel fluctuation and the pandemic.

While vice was not officially reinstated as its own separate unit until December 2017, their unit was still included in the general fund.

Lieutenant Hill said the unit was under the supervision of the narcotics division prior to reinstatement because they handle similar crimes but, due to growing personnel, separation was necessary.

“Vice and narcotics, they kind of do a lot of the same stuff,” Hill said, “but the number of personnel that the narcotics lieutenants had to manage was too many.”

The reestablishment of the unit also came with a drastic increase in the allocated budget during its second year, primarily in the base pay of its officers.

In 2018, the total budget for vice was $587,630, with $377,861 allocated for base pay alone. The following year, the total grew 215% to $1,855,171 with a 283% increase in allocated base pay.

This was no surprise to Hill. He said that personnel and base pay always have the biggest impact on their overall budget aside from the occasional ask for new equipment by department members.

“Any other increase in budget a lot of times is when the unit is needing gear,” said Hill,  “especially when you’re talking about technology, because that can get expensive real fast.”

While the pandemic played a role in their budget decrease for the 2020 budget, Westbrook said money decreased because they aren’t fully staffed.

“Our staff is authorized at 10 officers, but I have not kept 10 officers in the vice unit,” said Westbrook, adding that the unit is currently staffed at seven officers. “It's not that we don't need police staff, It's just that we don't have the ability to currently staff fully,” he said.

Hill attributed the staffing vacancies partially to a decrease in hiring and training of officers when the whole department is “close to a hundred percent strength,” coupled with departures from the unit through retirement or other reasons every year.

“It's not a quick fix whenever you start getting behind,” Hill said, “to hire an officer, put him or her through the police academy, put them through training… It's a year and a half following them.”

Regarding officer retirement, Hill said the number is a mystery every year.

“Whenever you think you're going to have X number of officers that retire every year, you're kind of guessing, “ Hill said, “'cause you don't really know for sure if they're leaving or not. It's a guessing game, just trying to look at the averages.”

With COVID-19 affecting most of 2020, Sergeant Westbrook said his unit had to treat life as normal.

But with a majority of the strip clubs shut down due to the pandemic, the unit had to focus its efforts in other places. 

“As far as the bars and stuff the VICE deals with, they were closed down,” said Lieutenant Hill. “We were tasked with other things and dealing more with COVID stuff, so budget-wise the guys pretty much went to a day shift schedule because all of the bars were closed for the most part for quite a while so they moved to more of a day schedule doing stuff which changed our shift differential,” Hill also mentioned.

The night patrols have to monitor certain locations more closely. 

“We have certain locations throughout the city that garner more attention from the PD as a whole and others, so you got certain hotspots, I guess you could say, in each division, just geographically there in a higher crime rate in that division, so honestly our efforts are going to go where the crimes are.”

With their efforts targeted on high crime areas, the vice unit saw a change in their typical shifts during the peak of COVID-19.

With the pandemic hitting the city of Fort Worth in a variety of ways, the unit saw its budget decrease due to those same reasons. 

“When they start looking at your budget for the next year they look back on how you performed or what money you spent the year before," Westbrook said. "Everybody was kind of down for the most part. Everybody spent less because during COVID everyone was told to limit their interaction with the public.” 

While the unit was able to still function during the pandemic, it was a major shift to deal with out-of-the-norm tasks. 

These students contributed to this report: Izzy Acheson, Allie Brown, Maddy Buchanan, Elizabeth Burns, Chloe Cloud, Chaelie DeJohn, Ella Gibson, Kate Hellmund, Anya Ivory, Nicole Johnson, Iris Lopez. Mike Niezgodzki, Camilla Price, Rebecca Robinson, Edgar Saenz, Tristen Smith, Bailee Utter, Katherine Vaughn, Kyla Vogel