In honor of Human Trafficking Awareness Month, the COPS Office would like to highlight some resources available for addressing human trafficking:

• A Look at Human Trafficking and San Diego’s Crime Initiative for Their Southwest Border. This article covers the work that is being done in San Diego, California, to combat human trafficking.
• Below Ten: Combating Drugs, Guns, and Human Trafficking at the U.S. Southwest Border. The Below Ten project focused on three cities located on or below Interstate 10—(1) Nogales, Arizona; (2) Pharr, Texas; and (3) San Diego, California—and their efforts to respond to a wide range of problems related to guns, drugs, and human trafficking. A key component of the project was the series of summits held to develop stakeholder-led plans to respond to the wide range of humanitarian, commercial, and enforcement issues. This publication describes the outcomes of these summits, which brought community members together with local, state, federal, and tribal law enforcement; public health providers; social services; and other groups to identify problems, challenges, and solutions. It also provides detailed information on the approach adopted by each community and the activities that have been sustained since the project ended.
• Child Sex Trafficking: A Training Series for Frontline Officers. Child Sex Trafficking: A Training Series for Frontline Officers is a toolkit developed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police in partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the COPS Office. It includes a series of training videos to be used in law enforcement agencies across the country, a discussion guide meant to reinforce key information contained in the videos and to assist officers in applying this knowledge to their role as first responders in their community, and quick reference sheets to supplement the videos and discussion guide. Please note this is a law enforcement–sensitive training and requires authorization before shipping.
• Combating Child Sex Trafficking: A Guide for Law Enforcement Leaders. Child sex trafficking involves a number of crimes requiring law enforcement to collaborate with multiple partners to identify and respond to the child victims while holding accountable those who are responsible for their exploitation. Combating this crime requires working with prosecutors, schools, victim service providers, parole officers, child welfare agencies, community members, and others. This guide aims to help law enforcement leaders adopt effective multidisciplinary approaches to address this crime and provides tips on training, identifying resources, and engaging communities. This guide also includes descriptions of effective programs in five law enforcement jurisdictions.
• Exploitation of Trafficked Women. This guide describes the problem of exploiting women who have been trafficked into the United States and the aspects of human trafficking that contribute to that problem. In addition, the guide focuses on the final period in the process of trafficking at which women are further exploited by those into whose hands they are passed. The guide identifies a series of questions that can help law enforcement analyze their local problems related to trafficking of women. Finally, it reviews responses to the exploitation of trafficked women and examines what is known about the effectiveness of these responses from research and police practice.
• Human Trafficking: Department of Labor’s Role. Ernesto Archila, Special Assistant at the Office of Public Engagement at the U.S. Department of Labor, discusses the U.S. Department of Labor's work on labor trafficking and the importance of knowing the indicators to better identify trafficking victims.
• Human Trafficking: Sex Offender Unit. In this podcast, Paul Brennan, Supervisory Community Supervision Officer of the Sex Offender Unit at Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, discusses the unit's work and the intersection with human trafficking.
• Human Trafficking: Working with Medical Profs. In this podcast, Dr. Allison Jackson, Chief of the Child and Adolescent Protection Center at the Children's National Medical Center, discusses the center's work with at-risk youth and how medical professionals and law enforcement can work together to identify and assist trafficking victims.
• Interdiction for the Protection of Children: A Program of Partnerships to Stop Trafficking. This article highlights the work that Texas Department of Public Safety is doing to train patrol officers and service partners on the detection, interdiction, and rescue of child victims of crimes.
• The Intersection of Local Law Enforcement and Labor Trafficking. This article focuses on how local law enforcement can tackle labor trafficking.
• Modern-Day Slavery: Community Policing has a Blueprint for ‘Walking the Talk’. This article covers steps different organizations can take to combat human trafficking with community policing strategies.
• New Resources for Combating Human Trafficking. This article covers Federal Government resources for combating human trafficking.
• Street Prostitution, 2nd Edition. Focusing on the problem of female street prostitutes, this guide provides practitioners with information regarding prostitutes, their clients, and traffickers and panderers as well as explaining the transaction and the environment associated with the problem. It also describes the linkage between prostitution and drugs. The guide provides questions to ask when dealing with the problem of street prostitution, identifies potential responses to the problem, and proposes measures to assess the effectiveness of response approaches.

One final resource available from the COPS Office is technical assistance. The Collaborative Reform Initiative for Technical Assistance Center (CRI-TAC) provides critical and tailored technical assistance resources to state, local, territorial, and tribal law enforcement agencies on a wide variety of topics, including human trafficking. By the field, for the field—per your agency’s request, the CRI-TAC is able to deliver personalized technical assistance by leading subject matter experts. To learn more about CRI-TAC, please visit the COPS Office Collaborative Reform web page.

Nazmia Comrie, Senior Program Specialist
COPS Office

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