‘You can order a human being as easily as pizza’

Give credit to Washington County for wanting to find out how pervasive human trafficking is around here.

Now it’s found out. It’s disgustingly bad.

Online solicitations in the metro area of Minneapolis St. Paul in just the first quarter of this year reached 16,000, the Star Tribune’s Kevin Giles reports today.

Imran Ali, the county’s major crimes prosecutor, told county commissioners yesterday that many of the solicitations are for underage girls, and all of them came from just one website, backpage.com, the Village Voice media spinoff.

“The bottom line here is, you can order a human being as easily as you can order a pizza for dinner,” county attorney Mike Orput told commissioners.