Virginia’s Analytics System for Trafficking (VAST)

Outcomes Delivered

With VAST, public officials and organizations across Virginia are better equipped to aid victims, prosecute criminals and prevent trafficking. For example, in the first 6-months of VAST’s deployment, we launched a front-line tool and executive level reporting dashboards that marry real-time data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website with historical locality provided data, which directly aids in the location of missing children.

DCJS also identified the need for more training for law enforcement when arrest and sentencing data related to prostitution suggested that law enforcement agencies continue to focus on buyers and sellers rather than traffickers.

While the VAST project plan included a 6-month training window, the solution was so intuitive and user friendly the training took less than a week, and all users of the executive level reports and the front-line tools are now actively using the data to drive daily activities.

Challenge

The highly decentralized nature of data related to human trafficking was preventing Virginia’s Department of Criminal Justice System (DCJS), as well as other stakeholders across the Commonwealth, from clearly understanding the trafficking landscape and creating data-driven strategies and services in response. DCJS needed a unified statewide data collection system for human trafficking in order to address this challenge and ensure strategic direction, services, and decisions about the allocation of state and local resources are as informed as possible.

Solution

Voyatek, created Virginia’s Analytics System for Human Trafficking (VAST), a comprehensive data collection and analytics system. VAST allows Virginia to capture accurate data about human trafficking and then analyze that information at a deeper level. Stakeholders can better understand the risk factors of human trafficking victims, the relationship between the perpetrator and victim, the demographics of the perpetrator and victim, the locations where the offenses occurred, and more. These insights inform a variety of decisions that include, but are not limited to, funding decisions, the deployment of investigative resources, the locations that need support in developing services, and the types of services that need to be improved or developed.

“One of the very important features of VAST is the ability for professionals within appropriate agencies to receive daily reports with information on children who have been reported missing and on children who have been recovered. Historically, these professionals have only received a monthly report with this information. This allows these professionals to begin looking for these missing children quickly and effectively while being able to focus only on the active cases.”

-Angella Alvernaz, State Trafficking Response Coordinator