Improving Human Trafficking Investigations: A Data-Driven Approach
Project Fact Sheet
The purpose of this project is twofold. First, the project will comprehensively analyze the Polaris Project data for the purpose of identifying patterns, trends, correlates, and predictors of calls to the national human trafficking hotline maintained by Polaris. As part of the analysis, the researchers will supplement the Polaris data with additional open-source data maintained by the HSTC or gathered from publicly available sources such as the US Census, US Bureau of Labor, Uniform Crime Reports, or other relevant entities. Second, the researchers will work with HSTC personnel and interested partners (e.g. Rescue Freedom, MIT Lincoln Lab, Polaris) to coordinate and manage a multi-partner effort to develop a national human trafficking prediction model that will leverage the Polaris data, data collected and maintained by the HSTC, and other data sources available from or collected by the partner organizations.