“We are so fragmented,” Sharmin Bock told the governor. She’s a former prosecutor in Alameda County who tried the first sex trafficking case in the U.S. Now, she’s advising the first partner on how California can do a better job fighting the predators — traffickers and buyers alike — who daily trade cash for the use of a human body, willing or not.

OAKLAND — From a tiny second-floor office in Alameda County Superior Court, Deputy District Attorney Sharmin Eshraghi Bock is leading a state-wide charge to spare teenage prostitutes and jail their pimps. 

“We treat the girls as victims and deliver specialized services to them, and we prosecute the pimps to the maximum sentences possible,” Bock said in an interview one day last week as she rushed to a court hearing carrying the trademark tools of her trade: a thick court filein one hand and a Blackberry cell phone in the other. 

“…Police refer these arrests to Sharmin Eshraghi Bock, Alameda County’s assistant district attorney for human expoitation and trafficking. Bock said her caseload is huge. “We have an epidemic going on here,” Bock said. Bock couldn’t provide exact numbers, but she said she now parcels out some cases to other attorneysin the district attorney’s office. A decade ago, she said, her unit didn’t even exist.”