For years Backpage.com was a scourge of Dallas. The website long denied any responsibility, but its pages were widely used by human traffickers to sell sex across the internet. A year ago that came to an end when officials shuttered the site and started bringing cases against those responsible for creating and supporting it.

But now, in Backpage’s old Oak Lawn offices, something new and hopeful is emerging. An anti-human trafficking organization, the Deliver Fund, has rented the space and is building out a training center that has a good chance to make a material difference in the fight against modern slavery.

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The idea behind the Deliver Fund is simple. For nearly two decades, the United States has carried out a protracted campaign against terrorist networks around the world. To succeed in that fight, the federal government has developed key insights on how to roll up organizations that spread across borders. Part of that has involved training Americans in how to gather, analyze and disseminate intelligence essential to identify and track bad actors and then systematically dismantle their networks. American success in the war on terror is driven by such intelligence.

What the Deliver Fund is doing is taking some of what has been learned in that effort and applying it to the fight against human traffickers right here, inside the United States. This is crucial because police departments across the country often don’t have the technology or the training to analyze the networks traffickers use, even when those traffickers are operating in plain sight right there on Facebook or another social media platform.

And, yes, often the traffickers boast about their exploits on social media. Looking at the Facebook account of a trafficker recently, one official with the Deliver Fund pulled up a photo that featured a woman holding a trash bag full of cash. “That’s what we call a clue,” he told us. Every bit of information collected by the Deliver Fund to build out a profile of a trafficker is legally obtained — in fact it’s publicly available.

The value here is twofold. First, Deliver Fund is stacked with former special operators from the U.S. military, some of whom also served a stint in the Central Intelligence Agency. Others come from law enforcement agencies, where they served in units that targeted the sex trade. This allows the organization to develop and analyze data in a way that can rapidly speed up the work of police officers who are building human trafficking cases. To that end, the Deliver Fund is building a database that law enforcement agencies can use to talk each other, find patterns, and otherwise spot the traffickers in our midst.

The second component comes in the form of training. The organization is training officers from across the country in how to collect and analyze data. The upshot is that, previously, it often took three weeks or more for an officer to build a case against a trafficker. But using these techniques an actionable case can be constructed in a matter of hours. That’s important because it allows law enforcement agents to catch up to a suspect before he or she hops to a different location or before more abuse of a trafficking victim takes place.

So far, this training has been provided to officers in Fort Worth, Houston and dozens of other locales in Texas and in several other states. The training itself is expensive on a per-officer basis. Licensing agreements alone for the software used (developed by for-profit companies) can cost about $5,000 an officer per year. But any given department should only need a handful of officers authorized to use the software, so the cost shouldn’t be prohibitive.

The important element here is that work like this can greatly enhance law enforcement efforts to fight human trafficking while not busting budgets. By developing this approach and offering it to departments across the country, the Deliver Fund is doing something we often see in other spheres. A nonprofit is doing the hard work of research and development, which then allows others to scale the insights gained.

In other words, this work could enable police departments to benefit from the insights gleaned here and partner with other departments as they do battle with traffickers who quickly hop from one jurisdiction to another. In the process, more police officers will make better use of the analytical tools that are revolutionizing modern life.

The hope is that this work will raise the cost of doing business and increase the risk of getting caught. When the cost and risk get high enough, it begins to push traffickers out of the trade and convinces customers that it’s not worth the chance they’ll end up in the back of a squad car.

The Deliver Fund has been around for several years, but in many ways it resembles a lean startup. It has about 20 employees, many of whom work remotely across the country, and it is still furnishing its office space here in Dallas. Time will tell how successful it will be as it continues to ramp up. But count us among those who love the symbolism of an organization that uses the logo of breaking apart an old slave shackle now occupying the space of a website that was a leading source of customers for human traffickers.

American dollars fuel the illicit sex trade, Americans serve as a key customer base, and very often American girls are ensnared in the trade right here in the United States. So it’s a delight to see Dallas entrepreneurial leaders in the fight. Backpage is gone. In its place is an organization working to stamp out human trafficking.