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Date Trend snippet:
23 June 2021
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2020
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The use of AI-driven analytics by law enforcement to combat sex trafficking
As part of the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within law enforcement agencies, the anti-trafficking community has been focusing on how technology can help in combatting sex trafficking. At the centre of this are “data-based efforts”, with public and private initiatives seeking to restructure how sex trafficking investigations are carried out by leveraging the power of AI, data, and advanced analytics.
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This paper reviews the use of AI-driven analytics by law enforcement to combat sex trafficking and evaluates the impacts it is having on law enforcement. Police agencies around the world are increasingly using AI-driven analytics software to help them in the fight against sex trafficking, as this technology now allows for the huge amounts of online data left by traffickers to be collected, processed, and analysed. The ability to do so has prompted the spread of the policing approach known as data-driven policing – by using actionable intelligence in real time as provided by the AI-driven analytics software, law enforcement can develop much more proactive and in-depth responses while utilising resources more efficiently. However, this reliance on data is also a concern, as the quality of intelligence produced by AI-driven analytics is only so good as the data it processes. Data gaps and misleading data can weaken police responses. Moreover, the risk of developing incomprehensible and unaccountable AI systems is also high. It is recommended for law enforcement to establish a framework that guides the implementation of AI technologies in this domain. Overall, the use of AI-driven analytics to fight sex trafficking represents how crime prevention now lies at the intersection of technology and data.
As part of the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) within law enforcement agencies,1 the anti-trafficking community has been focusing on how technology can help in combatting sex trafficking. At the centre of this are “data-based efforts”,2 with public and private initiatives seeking to restructure how sex trafficking investigations are carried out by leveraging the power of AI, data, and advanced analytics.3 In this paper it has been chosen to use the term AI-driven analytics to describe the application of AI technologies to advanced analytics capabilities. While initially developed for enterprises, it is now being deployed by law enforcement agencies, prosecutors’ offices, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) across the world to combat and investigate sex trafficking.4 Indeed, AI-driven analytics is being credited with helping rescue hundreds of victims and providing the necessary leads to bring down traffickers.5 Some of the most popular software today include Memex, Traffic Jam, XIX, and Spotlight. AI-driven analytics has had profound impacts on law enforcements’ crime prevention capabilities and is one of the most adopted AI technologies by police agencies around the world. As such, its practical application to sex trafficking investigations merits to be carefully studied in order to gain a better understanding of its impacts on law enforcements’ approaches, outlooks, and capacities. Examining this particular application also helps shed light on the wider benefits and challenges of integrating more AI technologies within the police. This article begins by contextualising what is meant by sex trafficking; then, it reviews AI-driven analytics – how the technology works and how it is being practically applied to disrupt sex trafficking. Finally, it evaluates the main impacts that it is having on law enforcement. It finds that AI-driven analytics is extremely useful for law enforcement agencies to garner greater insights into sex trafficking patterns and trends while providing invaluable leads for investigations and operations. More than that though, the use of AI-driven analytics reflects an ongoing shift in law enforcement toward a greater reliance on big data, giving rise to an increasingly data-driven policing approach.6 With the exponential growth in the volume of data, law enforcement will continue to require powerful analytical capabilities to process and analyse it. Thus, as represented by antitrafficking efforts, combatting crime increasingly lies at the intersection of technology and data.
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With law enforcement agencies often lacking the infrastructure, resources, and skills to develop an AI-driven analytics capability, we are seeing that in this field, the actors involved in developing new technological initiatives are varied, “multi-sector, multidisciplinary and international.”23 Commercial enterprises work alongside actors from the public sector including law enforcement agencies, academia, and non-governmental organisations. Law enforcement agencies, prosecutors’ offices, District Attorney offices, and NGOs across the world are using these tools: more than 30 law enforcement agencies across the world are using Memex software to help in human trafficking investigations; Spotlight is currently used by more than 4,000 law enforcement officials across 780 agencies in the United States, having helped to identify more than 6,300 victims of sex trafficking in the US so far;24 Traffic Jam has long-standing partnerships with law enforcement agencies, prosecutors’ offices and non-profit organisations.25 These solutions have been developed for use specifically in the anti-sex trafficking field – they leverage the online connections that buyers and sellers have and the data this creates. First, cutting-edge “search and analytics engine[s]” are designed for law enforcement.26 Then, online data is collected, after which a host of AI technologies mine it to garner deeper insights, derive patterns, conduct analyses, and provide predictions autonomously27 at a “scale, speed and depth” that cannot be matched by human analysts.28 It then delivers the results of the analyses in intuitive visual tools that aid in decision-making. In this field, most of the data that is used comes from online ads for sexual services.
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By unlocking insights and connections from data that would have otherwise not been found, AI-driven analytics is transforming the very approach that officers are taking towards sex investigations. This new approach to crime fighting has been coined “data driven policing”, and it involves the automatic collection and analysis of large datasets, in this case through AI-driven analytics, allowing police officers to shape their measures and responses around real-time information gathered.55
