When It Comes to Data on Trafficking, Metrics Matter

When It Comes to Data on Trafficking, Metrics Matter

Our monitoring of the region's criminal economies has taught us the importance of using different metrics to assess policies aimed at curbing different types of trafficking.

When it comes to drug trafficking, the primary metric we follow is drug seizures. For arms trafficking, we examine how many crimes are committed using guns. And for human trafficking and smuggling, we often look to migration flows.

Here’s what those numbers can tell us.?

Drug Trafficking

We use drug seizures to track patterns in drug trafficking flows and supply chains. In a recent post we said that we did not expect drug decriminalization to have any effect on seizures, instead pointing to drug legalization as the policy we expected would cause a change in this metric.

Drug legalization can create legal markets that compete with criminal markets, leading to reduced demand and profitability of trafficked drugs. If effective, seizures of the legalized drug could fall.

We cannot look at seizure data on its own, and there are many potential causes for a change. But combined with information for other sources, it helps to estimate flows and primary routes for drug traffickers.

And though it may be tempting to extend the same logic to other forms of trafficking, different market dynamics mean we expect legalization to have different effects.

Arms Trafficking

Drugs and arms differ in key respects, which is why we focus on different metrics when examining these criminal economies.

Guns, unlike drugs, can be used over and over – if the user has enough ammunition. It is also difficult to distinguish legal arms from illegal arms, given that the definition can sometimes depend on who is in possession of the weapon.

Those differences lend arms seizures some shortcomings as an analytical tool. For example, in Brazil, arms seizures reportedly dropped slightly under ex-President Jair Balsonaro. But far more importantly, the number of legal firearms imports and legally registered weapons surged, with many criminals taking advantage of Bolsonaro’s pro-gun policies to arm up.

In that case, and in others, we can draw conclusions about the state of the illicit arms market by looking at other data, such as how many crimes are committed using a firearm.

Human trafficking

In other cases, as is often true with human trafficking, the data quality is too low to be useful.

Poor quality data can push our analysis in the wrong direction. If there are systematic errors in reporting or measurement, false trends and spurious correlations can emerge, making us think there is something going on.?

Measurement of certain variables is often very different depending on the country and its laws, making comparing countries difficult, and potentially hiding trends, and so data alone is never enough.

Instead of relying on official human trafficking data, we often focus on migration flows as legal and illegal movement often follow the same routes. We combine this with our on-the-ground research to better estimate the size of the criminal market, like we did in our recent investigation.?

Javier Sagredo

Sustainable development-based innovative public policy solutions

2 个月

Using drug seizures data as a major indicator to assess policies and estimate flows consolidates the classic bias of looking to reality like the drunk guy looking for his keys by the lamp post though he lost them in the dark far away, only because there is light in that place. To have a clearer picture, sound police and financial intelligence information could be more reliable, data in seizures only show info where there is police activity. Although there is intense drug trafficking and use in some of the richest areas of cities, seizures are mostly materialized in poor open market districts, where police patrol and intervene. This data generates additional stigma for countries, communities, neighborhoods and population crossed by the visible trafficking corridors. Little data is generated on by who and how drug money is being laundered in the big financial centers of developed countries when it should be the only priority for effective fight against powerful TOC if drugs will continue to be illegal. With this in mind, data on flows becomes irrelevant: if it generates a reaction to try to stop drugs, flows always go somewhere else and displace the war on drugs' dynamics to new places. Not much help for effective policy analysis...

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