Capturing Human Trafficking Victimization Through Crime Reporting

Abstract

In 2008, the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act authorized the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin collecting offense and arrest data about human trafficking as part of the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. In 2013, the UCR program began collecting information in the Summary Reporting System and the National Incident-Based Reporting System to capture two Part I offenses: Human Trafficking/Commercial Sex Acts and Human Trafficking/Involuntary Servitude (FBI, 2015). The addition of human trafficking offense categories in the UCR program is a significant step towards improving our understanding of the scope of the issue. However, there are many reasons to be concerned that human trafficking offenses known to the police and reported through the UCR underreport the extent to which human trafficking is occurring in local communities. This study explores how local law enforcement agencies classify human trafficking cases that they identify through their internal records management and external crime reporting programs in three United States communities. The research team examined over 600 human trafficking investigations and interviewed law enforcement and crime reporting personnel in each study site to understand how human trafficking cases are identified and reported by the police. Interviews with victim service providers and non-law enforcement agencies in each study community about how they identify and report human trafficking victimizations also helped the research team understand the sources of information about human trafficking incidents that exist outside of law enforcement data. Finally, utilizing Multiple System Estimation (MSE) procedures that compare information about identified human trafficking victims who exist in the data systems of multiple providers in the study communities, the research team identified how frequently human trafficking victims are identified across multiple administrative data systems in a community. MSE procedures were employed to develop an estimate of the number of sex and labor trafficking victims in each study community as a mechanism to gauge the degree to which law enforcement data on human trafficking offenses represent the population of human trafficking victims in a community. (Author Text)