The fight against this kind of human trafficking is Sisyphean, with front-liners like Gallagher hoping for nothing more than maybe moving the racket to another area. “The most I can hope for is to displace it,” he says.

Night after night, day after day, he and his team go out, and “it never, ever slows down. It never stops,” says Gonzalez, who, like Gallagher, is the father of a teenage girl — a fact that never drifts far from their minds as they look at the faces of the girls they encounter.

When they describe the things they’ve seen — looking for missing girls as young as 11 or seeing what one violent pimp or another did to a girl — their cop masks, the face of calm while cuffing a john or questioning a stoned passenger of a hot-boxed car about missing girls, drop for a moment. Even after all their years of policing these streets, they still get incredibly invested in finding girls like Stacey, ready to take apart a neighborhood stone by stone to find to her.

Gallagher and his team seem to have developed a kind of super street vision. They can see a shadow move in the dark, sense a sideways glance from faces tilted away from them. Time and time again, driving around the poorly lit blocks, Gallagher would see a shadow in his peripheral vision and break off midsentence to radio Gonzalez before turning to chase down the shadow, but none of them turned out to be Stacey that night.

Gallagher’s familiar with the faces, the cars and the blocks, and he keeps hoping that others might come to know them and that developers will discover the area.

“These people don’t even have a Starbucks,” he says. This might not sit with those who fret about gentrification, but he would rather see people scowling over Frappuccino sales than dealing with the liquor store that charges girls $5 per trick to let them use its backroom.

“People gotta walk their kids to school past that … and all these motels that exist just for this,” says Gallagher, who says he has been writing Magic Johnson Enterprises, hoping it will go in, invest and draw some more-upscale businesses to Fig.

“Why can’t they come here and do what they did in the Bronx?” he asks, referring to Johnson’s efforts in the New York City borough, where he has attracted big box businesses such as Best Buy.