Dr. Douglas Gilmer joins Dr. Sandie Morgan as they explore how 30 years of carrying the memory of arresting a child who needed help, not handcuffs, drove his commitment to building true collaboration in anti-trafficking work.
Dr. Douglas Gilmer
Dr. Douglas Gilmer is a 35-year law enforcement veteran and proud military veteran who retired from the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Investigations in August 2024 after 25 years of federal service. In his final role, he served as Senior Law Enforcement Advisor at the DHS Center for Countering Human Trafficking in Washington, DC. His journey in this field began in 1993 when, as a Charlotte police officer, he encountered a 14-year-old girl being sold for sex. Throughout his federal career, Doug worked and supervised numerous human trafficking cases involving both sex and labor trafficking, domestic and international victims, and adults and minors. He also served as Chief of the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Center. After retiring, Doug founded Resolved Strategies LLC, a global justice solutions group dedicated to building collaborations and developing solutions to counter human trafficking. He holds a PhD in Organizational Leadership, with research focused on multidisciplinary collaboration in anti-trafficking work. In January 2025, Doug received the William Wilberforce Lifetime Achievement Award.
Key Points
- Dr. Gilmer’s research on multidisciplinary teams revealed that the MDT construct is being widely adopted because the old ways of responding to trafficking simply didn’t work, and both law enforcement and service providers report more positive attitudes toward each other than commonly assumed.
- Many social workers are taught in school and by veteran colleagues not to trust law enforcement, creating initial skepticism that dissolves once they experience collaborative work and realize officers genuinely care about victims and wouldn’t stay in this demanding field otherwise.
- The distinction between cooperation and collaboration is critical: cooperation involves helping someone achieve their goal with selfish motivation (“I” or “me”), while true collaboration means working together toward shared goals where your mission becomes mine and mine becomes yours (“we”).
- Law enforcement agencies are shifting their metrics of success, with HSI agents now receiving the same recognition for identifying and recovering a victim as they do for making an arrest, reflecting a genuinely victim-centered approach.
- Human trafficking should be approached as a “crime of crimes” with multiple prosecution pathways including money laundering, child sexual abuse material, and other charges that can achieve justice while protecting victims from the retraumatization of testifying.
- After 30 years of carrying guilt over arresting a 14-year-old trafficking victim in 1993, Dr. Gilmer found closure when a survivor told him at a conference: “You have to learn to forgive yourself for the things you did before you knew better.”
- The current funding and grant process for anti-trafficking work fosters competition between organizations rather than collaboration, creating a system where groups work against each other instead of for each other despite shared goals.
- Years later, a 16-year-old victim told Dr. Gilmer that after being trafficked since age 13, his response was “the first time law enforcement has ever tried to help me,” illustrating how far the field has progressed in adopting trauma-informed, victim-centered approaches.
Resources
Transcript
[00:00:00] Douglas Gilmer: I can remember handcuffing her, putting her in the back of my patrol car,
[00:00:09] Sandie Morgan: Thinking to myself, if this is the best we can do, why are we doing this? Our guest today was driven by 30 years of carrying the memory of arresting a child who needed help, not handcuffs. I’m Dr. Sandy Morgan with Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice, and our guest today is Dr. Doug Gilmer. He’s a 35 year law enforcement veteran, recently retired from Homeland Security Investigations and now leads resolved strategies.
[00:00:51] His focus is on building true collaboration in anti-trafficking work. Now, here’s our conversation.
[00:01:06] All right, Dr. Doug Gilmer, thank you so much for joining us on the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast.
[00:01:15] Douglas Gilmer: Thank you so much.
[00:01:17] Sandie Morgan: I’m excited because when I first met you, you were in HSI, but you wanted to have side conversations, and we started talking about the research you wanted to do as you were pursuing your PhD. And so let’s start there. Why did you wanna interview me?
[00:01:41] Douglas Gilmer: Well, I had, I had long been a fan
[00:01:47] Sandie Morgan: Okay. I can have fans.
[00:01:50] Douglas Gilmer: of Dr. and was very aware of the work that you had done, and I knew that collaboration was very important to you. It was, it was evident in your work and was evident in the work that the task force did, you know, that you helped to lead. And so you were, you were really kind of a natural fit for this project. I figured if, considering your experience and really your tenure in this field, I just knew that you would be a great, a great resource and really an expert.
[00:02:25] Sandie Morgan: I’m gonna borrow that language instead of presenting myself as old. An old timer in this field. I now have tenure in this field. That’s much better. So just really quickly, the highlights of your findings in that research. Can you give us a synopsis?
[00:02:47] Douglas Gilmer: Yeah, so really the research, it was qualitative research focused on the outcomes of multidisciplinary collaboration between law enforcement and service providers encountering human trafficking. What we learned through the research is that the multidisciplinary team construct, the MDT construct, works, that people were adopting the MDT construct because the old way of doing things didn’t work, and it was proving to be more effective. We learned that contrary to what we sometimes hear, law enforcement generally has a very positive attitude towards service providers, and that service providers actually have a positive attitude or a positive opinion of law enforcement.
[00:03:42] Sandie Morgan: Well hold up there because I wanna know why the myths still exists, that they’re opposing forces sometimes.
[00:03:53] Douglas Gilmer: Well, I think law enforcement comes from a slightly different mindset. We’re very skeptical
[00:04:02] Sandie Morgan: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:02] Douglas Gilmer: early on until we get to know somebody, until we learn to trust people. And then there was a theme that developed when talking to service providers, especially those who had degrees in social work that were, you know, licensed clinical social work workers, LMSW, that kind of thing. And what they shared was that they were really kind of taught from the beginning not to trust law enforcement when they were in school. They were told, don’t trust law enforcement. You can’t trust law enforcement. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about your clients. All they care about is making a case. And then when they got out and they went to work and they were being trained, the veterans were telling them, you can’t trust law enforcement. Don’t trust law enforcement. They don’t care about you. They don’t care about your clients. They only care about making a case. So they said, we went into this with perceptions based upon what we had been taught and what we had been told we couldn’t trust law enforcement. And they said, but you know, once we, so we were very skeptical when we became part of this MDT or this collaboration. But what we actually found was that law enforcement really did care
[00:05:27] Sandie Morgan: Hmm.
[00:05:27] Douglas Gilmer: that they wouldn’t be there doing this work if they didn’t care. You typically don’t choose this line of work. This line of work sometimes I think chooses you. It’s a
[00:05:38] Sandie Morgan: Yeah.
[00:05:39] Douglas Gilmer: right? And so the people that are there and the people that stick with it, I think are truly committed.
[00:05:47] Sandie Morgan: That really reflects my experience because when I first started working with law enforcement at the Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force, my boss was Derek Marsh. And as the law enforcement co-chair of our task force, he trained me. And the words you used, from the get go trust was a big part of how he trained me. He made sure that I understood his job was to make sure everybody at the scene was safe. And I knew it was dangerous. I knew the traffickers had guns. I knew that I did not have the situational awareness to manage that. Now, I was a nurse. I still am a nurse, and I knew how to provide victim care, and he trusted my expertise. And so we developed a very strong collaboration. So I think trust is definitely part of that, and we are erasing that myth and finding out that we have common goals that are centered and just as focused. So let’s talk a little bit more about how your career was shaped by encountering human trafficking. I always remember my first case, we didn’t even have the language of human trafficking. I admitted a 14-year-old boy at two o’clock in the morning and his family members had been selling him. My brain could not wrap itself around that. What was your moment of clarity? And maybe we can use your word calling.
[00:07:54] Douglas Gilmer: I think for me it began there, there were a couple of events. The first one was in 1993. And so this was before we had the TVPA, before we had really modern human trafficking legislation. This was before really we had CACs across the country.
[00:08:19] Sandie Morgan: Define C. A. C for my listeners.
[00:08:22] Douglas Gilmer: Child advocacy center.
[00:08:24] Sandie Morgan: Okay.
[00:08:24] Douglas Gilmer: And I encountered a 14-year-old girl on a street in Charlotte, North Carolina who had propositioned an undercover vice detective
[00:08:41] Sandie Morgan: Hmm.
[00:08:42] Douglas Gilmer: and I was there to support their operation. And this is actually a very difficult story for me to tell. I had to arrest that 14-year-old girl and charge her with prostitution, and I can remember handcuffing her, putting her in the back of my patrol car, thinking to myself, if this is the best we can do, why are we doing this? And to be honest, Dr. Morgan, I have dealt with so much guilt and shame since 1993 over that incident. But you know, I did what I was told to do. I did what the law told me to do. I did what I knew to do in 1993. And actually it wasn’t until just recently, a few months ago, I actually, I had to tell this story in front of a room of a couple of hundred survivors and it was very, very difficult for me to tell this story. And I had no idea what the reaction was gonna be. But afterwards, someone came up to me and gave me a hug and said, it’s okay. You have to learn to forgive yourself for the things you did before you knew better. And that was a, that was kind of like a big closing chapter for me in that story. But then even more recently, you know, back, I guess about eight years ago now, there was another girl who was 16, who had been trafficked. Just a horrible, a horrible story. The things that had happened to her. And I just remember at the end of that, end of that evening, you know, getting her to a safe space, really looking out for her needs. And as I was getting ready to leave, she turned to me and she said, Mr. Doug. And I said yes, and she said, I want you to know that this has been happening to me since I was 13 years old, and this is the first time law enforcement has ever tried to help me.
[00:11:44] Sandie Morgan: It’s a new day and what that survivor advocate said to you. Until you knew better. I think that until you knew better is now in the field of law enforcement. And that’s a great segue for us to talk about your new organization. What’s the name of it?
[00:12:12] Douglas Gilmer: Resolved
[00:12:13] Sandie Morgan: Oh, it’s, it’s on your shirt. I love that we’re doing this video, resolved strategies. So tell us how that is going to change the landscape.
[00:12:25] Douglas Gilmer: So, you know, the term, I think we all pretty much know what strategies are, but the term resolved according to the dictionary means to be firmly determined to do something.
[00:12:36] Sandie Morgan: Hmm.
[00:12:37] Douglas Gilmer: That’s the tech, that’s,
[00:12:38] Sandie Morgan: My mother said that was stubborn.
[00:12:41] Douglas Gilmer: It could be that too. And but what I have found now over 30 years in this field is that there are a lot of people, there are a lot of organizations, there are a lot of agencies that all say, we are firmly determined to do something about this issue, but they don’t know what they’re doing. And when I talk to some of these organizations, sometimes they can’t even tell you why. They can, they can tell you big picture. They can say, well, we are, we are determined to end the scourge of human trafficking globally. And my answer is generally great. So is everybody,
[00:13:34] Sandie Morgan: Me too.
[00:13:35] Douglas Gilmer: Why are you doing this?
[00:13:36] Yeah, right. Why are, but why are you doing this? And they can’t identify a mission. They can’t identify their purpose. They can’t identify their core values as an organization. And a lot of them don’t understand how to truly collaborate. And if you can’t do those things, if you can’t, if you can’t identify who you are, why you’re doing what you’re doing, what those things are that mean most to you and you can’t effectively work with other people, collaborate, not cooperate, collaborate with other people. The best you’re going to do is move in circles. You’re never gonna, you’re never gonna move forward. You’re gonna be like a ship without a rudder, or a rudder stuck in one direction, and you’re just gonna keep going around and around. And I don’t, I don’t want that,
[00:14:24] Sandie Morgan: So.
[00:14:25] Douglas Gilmer: to succeed in what they’re doing.
[00:14:27] Sandie Morgan: Help us understand why you’re delineating between cooperation and collaboration.
[00:14:36] Douglas Gilmer: So cooperation at its core has a selfish motivation, not necessarily selfish in a negative term, right? The example I often use, if my cows get out of my fence on my farm and I call down the road to my neighbor who doesn’t own my cows, but I say, Hey, can you come down here and help me get my cows back in the fence? That’s cooperation. He’s coming to help me achieve my goal or my purpose, which is getting my cows in the fence. Right? He doesn’t have a stake in my cows, but I do. And so there’s kind of a selfish motivation that goes along with cooperation. When I ask, when we talk about cooperation, we’re really talking about I or me. Collaboration on the other hand is about we. It’s about working with others to achieve a shared goal or shared purpose where your goals become my goals and my goals become your goals, or working together in shared purpose.
[00:15:48] Sandie Morgan: I like that. Okay, so resolved strategies, we’re determined and collaboration is a key piece of the strategy. What kind of reach do you have with resolved strategies?
[00:16:08] Douglas Gilmer: Well, define reach.
[00:16:10] Sandie Morgan: Well, I just, I’m like kind of inching towards the international aspect of your approach because one of the problems that I’ve identified is when, for instance, I think in one report early on when I was task force administrator, we identified victims from 29 countries in one county. So having cultural knowledge, cultural humility, linguistic resources, that international component, we have jurisdictional boundaries. The traffickers do not.
[00:16:56] Douglas Gilmer: Correct.
[00:16:57] Sandie Morgan: So how are we building international collaboration?
[00:17:04] Douglas Gilmer: So I think well, and that’s, that’s an important aspect of working collaboratively and working in an MDT environment because you bring that cultural relevancy, you know, into that environment, hopefully, you’re, you know, you’re doing that. Granted most of my work, not all of it, but most of my work is domestic, you know, working, you know, working here in the United States. But I know we are, you know, just putting my DHS hat back on my HSI hat and having retired out of the center for countering human trafficking in DC, I know that we have been pushing collaboration at the international level as well, and doing vast amounts of training overseas to train our foreign partners. And also working, you know, because HSI has 80 plus international offices around the world, and so, you know, trying to get, you know, those offices on board with their foreign partners as well, you know, to work collaboratively on these cases that might involve, you know, international, you know, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and that kind of thing. And really continuing to push, you know, being victim centered and trauma informed, which is a policy of HSI, and
[00:18:42] Sandie Morgan: Well, and it’s, that policy comes with language that helps us understand, that helps us understand our common goals. And in my experience with law enforcement training overseas, I think we need to figure out how to adjust how we label it, because we don’t wanna come across as, oh, we know how to do this, and we’re gonna teach you. What I’ve discovered in my international work wi
