D.C. law enforcement, nonprofits plan to exchange human trafficking data

D.C. law enforcement and nonprofit groups are planning to share data to fight human trafficking, according to a newly released report.

The report released late last week by the Criminal Justice Coordinating Council (CJCC) notes the difficulty in knowing how many victims are trafficked in the region because the nonprofits that help them don’t share data with law enforcers.

“So right now when we give the number of victims, we don’t know how many duplicates are in that,” CJCC Deputy Director Kristy Love told The Washington Times. “With this shared database, it would give us an idea of how many individuals really have suffered from this crime and need assistance and need services, and help better inform government agencies on how many resources need to applied to this problem.”

The CJCC is an interagency task force assigned to address issues in the criminal justice system. The report is its first analysis of human trafficking, as required by the D.C. Council.

Based on data from 2016, the analysis shows that different agencies report different numbers of victims. Local nonprofits said they assisted 104 human trafficking victims in 2016, but the FBI reported only 19 victims and Metropolitan Police Department only six, according to the report.

Additionally, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District identified 26 victims, but the National Human Trafficking Hotline reported 84 cases.

The report also analyzed the type of victims, finding that black females in their teens or early 20s made up the majority of sex trafficking and labor trafficking victims in the District.

While it is possible that other groups of people are heavily trafficked and go unreported, Ms. Love said so far the findings about young black girls and women are reflected in reports from law enforcement and nonprofit groups.

“About 90 percent of the girls that we serve are girls of color,” Andrea Powell, executive director of the nonprofit crisis service provider Fair Girls, told The Times.

Collating victim data between service providers like Fair Girls and the FBI, the Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office could help confirm who is at risk for trafficking.

But some agencies say even if they use a central victim database, they have no plans to control it.

“Neither the U.S. Attorney’s Office nor any law enforcement organization was going to maintain that database or input details of criminal cases into it,” William Miller, spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, said in an email to The Times.

The Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI did not respond to requests for comment.

One service provider told The Times that a victims database would help their work but also raises privacy concerns.

“We want as much data out there as possible with the caveat that it can’t have any identifying features,” said Brandon Bouchard, spokesman for the National Human Trafficking Hotline.

Mr. Bouchard said the data could help bust people’s myths about trafficking not happening in their area — or it being like Hollywood movies.

“People often think it’s like the film ’Taken’ when that’s really not what traffic looks like for the most part,” he said.

In the meantime, the CJCC is preparing its next report, and hopes more data will shed light on the patterns of human traffickers in the region.

“As we go along and doing future reports we will have accumulated data over a certain span of time and that will be the point when we can really talk about trends,” said Ms. Love.