ABSTRACT

Research Summary The passage of new laws that criminalize the trafficking of persons for labor and sexual services has raised public awareness about the problem of human trafficking. In response, police must understand the problem, identify human trafficking victims, and make arrests. The numbers of victims identified to date, however, has paled in comparison with official estimates, which leads some to question the existence of a human trafficking problem. Missing from this debate is information about how frequently police encounter human trafficking and how well prepared officers are to handle these cases. Analyzing survey responses from a national sample of police agencies in the United States, we found that less than 10% of police agencies identified human trafficking cases from 2000 to 2006. Larger agencies were more likely to identify cases of human trafficking, but the agency leader perception about the problem in their local communities as well as taking steps to prepare officers to identify and respond were the most important factors to increasing human trafficking identification by police.