Florida’s task force approach to combat human trafficking: an analysis of county-level data

Abstract

Since emerging in the USA during the 1990s, the multi-agency task force has become the preferred organizational structure for enforcing human trafficking laws and providing assistance to victims. These task forces often work across county lines and typically include law enforcement agencies, as well as social service and non-governmental organizations. The effect of collaborations with other types of agencies on law enforcement’s human trafficking arrests is unknown. County-level arrest data for human trafficking first became available through the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2014. In this paper, we present findings from county-level analyses with human trafficking arrests in the State of Florida as the dependent variable. Independent variables include the presence of a task force, sociodemographic characteristics, tourism measures, and police officers per capita. The strongest predictor of human trafficking arrests is the presence of a task force.

Keywords:

• Police collaborations
• human trafficking task forces
• arrests
• Florida
• public policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Lin Huff-Corzine is a Professor and the former Director of the Sociology Undergraduate Program in the Department of Sociology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, USA. She is currently the Vice President of the Homicide Research Working Group. Professor Huff-Corzine’s research primarily focuses on violent crime. She is co-author of the research monograph, The Currents of Lethal Violence, and her articles appear in numerous journals, including but not limited to Criminology, Deviant Behavior, Homicide Studies, Justice Quarterly, the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, the Journal of Research on Crime and Delinquency, Social Forces, Victims and Offenders, and Violence and Victims.

Sarah Ann Sacra is a doctoral student and Dean’s Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Central Florida, USA. She is a member of the Homicide Research Working Group, the American Society of Criminology, and the Southern Sociological Society. Her primary research area is criminology with an emphasis on violence; including lethality, homicide, weapons, and mass murder. Her master’s thesis evaluated neighborhood-level social disorganization, emergency medical and police response times to shootings, and lethality in New Orleans, where she is originally from.

Jay Corzine’s academic career has spanned two universities in the USA, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 1978 to 1996 and the University of Central Florida (UCF) since 1996. His research focuses on violent crime, with specific interests including the impact of transportation routes on homicide and robbery, human trafficking, mass victimization incidents, the lethality of types of firearms, risk factors for assaults on police officers, and the influences of medical resources on lethality. He has published in numerous journals, including Criminology, American Journal of Sociology, Violence and Victims, Victims and Offenders, Homicide Studies, Deviant Behavior, Justice Research and Policy, and Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice.

Rachel Rados received her PhD in Sociology with a focus on crime and deviance and law enforcement in fall 2016. She is a sergeant with the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office in Florida and has served as a patrol deputy, a Major Crimes Investigator, a Patrol Sergeant and the Sergeant over Judicial Security. She is currently in charge of the School Resource Officers for Seminole County. Sergeant Rados a member of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) and Florida Sheriff’s Association and has presented several presentations at the ASC, as well as one at the Homicide Research Working Group involving new ideas to improve law enforcement methods and tactics.

Notes

1. Non-governmental organizations are private entities that operate independently of government supervision or control. In the USA, they are also non-profit and eligible for tax exempt status through the federal tax code.

2. As correctly pointed out by a reviewer, there is a long-standing debate over the use of tests of significance in analyses of populations (e.g., all counties in Florida in the current study) as opposed to samples. Specifically, the effect sizes of variables from regression models are reflections of population parameters instead of sample statistics. On the other hand, leadings journals in sociology and criminology, including American Sociological Review and Criminology, publish papers including tests of significance for populations. We focus primarily on effect sizes in the text below, but Table 2 includes tests of significance. We leave it to the reader to decide if this additional information is meaningful. A recent publication identified by the reviewer that would prove useful for gaining a beginning understanding of the controversy over tests of significance is Nunzo (2015).

3. VIFs: Port = 1.690, RentableRooms = 3.024, ProsRate = 2.081, Hispanic = 1.974, Poverty = 2.271, Family = 2.547, LEO = 1.084, TF – 1.738, Exits = 3.268, Metro = 3.839.

4. Skewness is a departure from a normal distribution of data points for a variable. In ordinary least squares, or OLS, and some other types of regression analyses, strategies to correct for severe skewness involving various data transformations, such as substituting the square root or the log for the original metric, would be appropriate. We do not do so in the current analyses because logistic regression makes no assumption of normality.