The City of Dallas is expected to make its human trafficking dashboard public soon.
Staff from the Dallas Police Department and the Office of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence (DBI) briefed the Dallas City Council Public Safety Committee on the progress of the dashboard during a meeting on Monday.
Jennifer Reed, a data science analyst for DBI, showed the committee members a preliminary version of the dashboard, which provides figures for total human trafficking crimes, along with other data such as the number of cases in which traffickers knew the victim and the number of youths rescued by DPD from human trafficking.
Figures presented on Monday showed that 118 human trafficking crimes were committed in Dallas last year, 29 were cases in which traffickers knew the victim. Some 99 youths were recovered by DPD, according to the data. As with other City dashboards, users will be able to filter data by time, location, demographics, and other factors.
However, Reed noted that there are some unique things about human trafficking that make it a difficult criminal activity to track.
“These interconnected metrics from the City and our partner organizations shed light on the issue. However, these data sets alone cannot be used to comprehensively identify every crime occurring in the city of Dallas,” she said. “Even when compared with other criminal activity, human trafficking can be difficult to detect as traffickers often condition the trafficked across time, using lies, threats, and intimidation to [get them to] lie to the police and other authorities regarding facts as simple as their own names and dates of birth.”
“Both the Dallas police data and the data provided by our partner organizations do reveal that this crime is not restricted to any one area of the city,” Reed continued. “This crime is not isolated to any one type of individual. It affects men as well as women, adults as well as youth.”
DPD Major Devon Palk, who oversees the special investigations division at the department, also noted during the meeting that human trafficking can take the form of sex trafficking, labor trafficking, or human smuggling.
Reed said that when the dashboard is published, it will be updated daily with new data from the City and quarterly with data from City partners.
No specific date for the launch of the dashboard was provided. City spokesperson Jennifer Carpenter told The Dallas Express that “the human trafficking dashboard is in its final stages of development.”
“We will be in touch with a timeline update when it’s available,” Carpenter said.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Gov. Greg Abbott recently declared January “Human Trafficking Prevention Month” in Texas. The official proclamation coincides with an awareness-raising campaign.
Cases of human trafficking in Dallas increased by 15.4% year over year in 2023. The Dallas Police Department has been struggling to keep crime under control amid an ongoing officer shortage. The department currently only fields around 3,000 officers when a City analysis advises some 4,000 are needed to properly maintain public safety.
