Understanding Law Enforcement Strategies and Needs for Combating Human Trafficking

In working to rescue victims of human trafficking, law enforcement officers face a host of challenges. Working in complex, layered organizational structures, they face challenges of collaboration and communication. Online information is central to every phase of a human-trafficking investigation. With terabytes of available data such as sex work ads, policing is increasingly a big-data research problem. In this study, we interview sixteen law enforcement officers working to rescue victims of human trafficking to try to understand their computational needs. We highlight three major areas where future work in human-computer interaction can help. First, combating human trafficking requires advances in information visualization of large, complex, geospatial data, as victims are frequently forcibly moved across jurisdictions. Second, the need for unified information databases raises critical research issues of usable security and privacy. Finally, the archaic nature of information systems available to law enforcement raises policy issues regarding resource allocation for software development.