Crime analysis helps law enforcement in dealing with organized criminals who are involved in
sex trafficking. Crime analysis goals, which include research, mapping, prevention, and
apprehension, help law enforcement agents to stop sex trafficking or control it. Sex trafficking
occurs when a person or a group of individuals is forced to get involved in commercial sex,
especially for the profit of the traffickers. In the United States, sex trafficking is a national
problem. According to DiRienzo (2022), sex trafficking accounts for 90 percent of all human
trafficking cases. Crime analysis can be used to identify and prevent organized crime groups
from trafficking. It can help law enforcement agents target the perpetrators, arrest them, and
recover victims of sex trafficking.
Criminal apprehension is one of the goals of crime analysis; it involves using recorded data and
analytical techniques (statistical or qualitative) to identify a criminal suspect and obtain evidence
against them. In sex trafficking contexts, criminal apprehension can occur by crime analysis
identifying and tracking organized criminal networks conducting this crime. Crime analysts can
collect historical data and analyze it to recognize patterns and trends, create insight for law
enforcement, recognize criminal suspects, and build a case against them. A good example is that
crime mapping is used as a method of crime analysis in Los Angeles County by the Probation
Department to identify areas of high sex trafficking incidence and achieve Department resource
allocation (Correu, 2021).
Crime mapping is one of the goals of crime analysis, and it can be used to fight organized crime
groups involved in sex tracking. Crime mapping will graphically distribute heat mapping of
crime on paper for easier identification of crime patterns and hotspots. Sex trafficking can be
tackled and controlled by using crime mapping to create a model to determine and distribute
resources to help areas where sex trafficking is most likely to occur.
Many Police Departments and many other law enforcement agencies in the United States are
using crime mapping techniques to locate places and areas where sex trafficking may likely
occur and carry out secret surveillance to determine other areas for suspicious sex trafficking
activities (De Vries, 2023). The resulting information from the crime mapping of the areas would
be useful for dismantling the organized criminal networks involved in sex trafficking.
Crime analysis can also support prevention efforts of sex trafficking through their understanding
of the operations of organized crime in this type of crime (Basu & Sen, 2021). By using data
from previous cases, the crime analysts can determine common tactics, techniques and
procedures of traffickers in the recruitment of victims, transportation of victims to locations for
sexual exploitation and establishment of control through violence or debt bondage over their
victims. The information can help in training police officers and other law enforcement agents to
figure out the activities of sex traffickers and save their intended victims.
Finally, crime analysts can advance their profession through research by addressing sex
trafficking committed by organized crime. Analysts of sex trafficking can research the profiles of
traffickers, their potential victim types, and all other issues that make sex trafficking crime to
thrive. The conducting of research by crime analysts can inform the law enforcement agency and
provide useful information that can strengthen knowledge on human trafficking. The research
that crime analysts conduct can be the foundation for making sound evidence-based
recommendations for policies or strategies aimed at addressing this issue.
Therefore, crime analysis can be implicit in responding to sex trafficking by organized crime
groups by focusing on the main goals of crime analysis to assist own law enforcement agency
with criminal apprehension, crime mapping, crime prevention and research.
References
Basu, K., & Sen, A. (2021). Identifying individuals associated with organized criminal networks:
A social network analysis. Social Networks, 64, 42-54.
Correu, J. C. (2021). Evaluating the Effectiveness of the Type and Level of Human Trafficking
Victims’ Services Received Against Recidivism Rates in the San Antonio Metro Area (Doctoral
dissertation, Northcentral University).
De Vries, I. (2023). Examining the geography of illicit massage businesses hosting commercial
sex and sex trafficking in the United States: The role of census tract and city-level factors. Crime
& Delinquency, 69(11), 2218-2242.
DiRienzo, C. E. (2022). Human trafficking: What the new IOM dataset reveals. Journal of
human trafficking, 8(3), 294-308.
