Fighting What Hides in the Shadows: How Flock is Helping Communities Combat Human Trafficking

Human trafficking is a crime that hides in plain sight. It exploits our modern infrastructure of roadways, motels, airports, and housing corridors. It festers in the blind spots between agencies, jurisdictions, and fragmented systems. To fight it, we need a coordinated, evidence-driven approach that connects people, data, and action in real time.

This week, Flock Safety’s Chief Communications Officer Josh Thomas joined the Approaches to Combating Human Trafficking forum to speak alongside leaders from public safety, advocacy, and the private sector. The message was clear: no single organization can end this crisis alone—but together, we can dismantle the systems that enable it.

25 Years After the TVPA: A Turning Point in the Fight

The forum marked a milestone: 25 years since the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) created a national framework around the “3 Ps”: prevention, protection, and prosecution. While progress has been made, today’s traffickers are more mobile, more networked, and more evasive than ever.

Flock Safety’s role in this fight? Empowering public safety agencies with the infrastructure they need to act faster, work smarter, and build stronger cases across jurisdictions.

The Trafficker’s Playbook: Movement, Anonymity, and Gaps

Human trafficking relies on:

• Movement: Victims are often transported across county or state lines every few days.
  
• Anonymity: Traffickers blend into traffic, using common vehicles and highways to avoid detection.
  
• Jurisdictional Blind Spots: Agencies may hold different pieces of a case, with no mechanism to connect them in time.

Flock helps solve all three.

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A Public Safety Ecosystem Built for Anti-Trafficking

Flock Safety’s integrated platform brings together the largest shared LPR network in the country, a unified agency-to-agency operating system, and an advanced public safety data platform. Together, these tools help:

• Act on intel in real time
• Recover victims faster
• Support multi-jurisdictional task forces
• Build stronger, evidence-rich cases

Here’s how each piece works in an anti-trafficking context:

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Flock LPR Network

What it is: The largest connected license plate reader network in the country.

How it helps:

• Flags suspect vehicles linked to BOLOs or previous trafficking cases
• Detects vehicle movement patterns across jurisdictions
• Sends real-time alerts when a known vehicle enters a new area
• Surfaces repeat visits to high-risk locations (motels, rest stops, drop zones)

FlockOS

What it is: A public safety operating system that connects agencies, systems, and workflows.

How it helps:

• Enables cross-agency collaboration with CAD-to-CAD and RMS integration
• Allows sharing of hotlists, video, and case details across county and state lines
• Supports rapid coordination during vehicle interdictions or victim recovery operations

Flock Nova

What it is: A unified data platform that aggregates LPR, CAD, RMS, OSINT, and more.

How it helps:

• Links disparate data points to uncover trafficking patterns
• Identifies repeat vehicles or locations tied to suspicious activity
• Helps analysts enrich cases, build timelines, and reduce time to arrest
• Surfaces common pickup/drop-off points that may indicate exploitation hubs
  
  

Built for the Realities of Human Trafficking Cases

Flock’s ecosystem is already supporting:

• Multi-jurisdictional human trafficking task forces
• Investigations into missing and exploited children
• Disruption of interstate commercial sex trafficking rings
• Recovery efforts for runaway or endangered juveniles

Flock’s infrastructure is designed to adapt to the scale, complexity, and urgency of real-world cases.

A Call to Action: Safety is a Shared Responsibility

As Josh notes on the topic:

“We can’t fight what we can’t see. Tech alone isn’t the answer—but it gives cities the clarity to act.”

Flock Safety is committed to being part of a holistic response to human trafficking, alongside law enforcement, service providers, community advocates and policy leaders. Together, we can make the invisible visible. We can respond faster, build stronger cases and help more survivors find freedom.

Real safety. Real places. Real lives saved.