Combating Human Trafficking Using Data Science

Polaris hypothesized that the resilience of the illegal massage businesses—the way they are able to open up in a new location after closing in another—indicates they are part of well-organized criminal networks; they were not simply “mom and pop” shops.

But without proof from the existing data—or strategies to visualize complex networks of IMBs—law enforcement agencies would continue to lose the fight against human trafficking.

To test the theory, Polaris tackled the human trafficking problem in a small city, manually identifying 35 illicit massage businesses and revealing how they were all connected. It was a difficult and labor-intensive process that relied heavily on cost-prohibitive tools. The answer and approach was right at their fingertips, but it wasn’t scalable—law enforcement, government, and prosecutors could not accommodate the manual labor required to handle and understand the data and connections between the information that could help shut down the illicit activities permanently. 

With a passion for investing in social good, Booz Allen offered to help Polaris. Together, we explored a number of problem-solving techniques to identify new ways to model the data Polaris used to map human trafficking networks. Challenged with the task of mapping networks in cities as large as 18 million people, Polaris needed a tool that would be flexible and scalable enough to address the needs of law enforcement, service providers and policymakers.

Together, Booz Allen and Polaris worked to better automate the mapping process, take on bigger cities containing hundreds—even thousands—of massage businesses, and train the model for wider circulation. “We started the proof of concept by identifying 35 [businesses] and then went to 900. It was a huge leap,” says Jennifer Kimball of Polaris.

The partnership resulted in a more developed and dynamic mapping system that easily adapts to new data inputs and doesn’t require the map to be rebuilt every time information is updated or changed.

Several states have adopted the mapping tool for use among law enforcement agencies and are doing enterprise-level investigations for human trafficking based off the tools and training that Polaris was able to provide.