Dave Newton served as a police officer in the United Kingdom for 30 years. During that time his work took him from his home town to large cities and eventually the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

He undertook many roles in the UK police, including community officer, team supervisor, intelligence officer and crime manager. For a number of years Dave worked with what is now the College of Policing, developing and delivering training. He retired from the police in 2008 after working with the UK Human Trafficking Centre (UKHTC) as a Detective Inspector.
From 2006 he had been attached to the UNODC as the main drafter of the UNODC global Anti Human Trafficking Manual, a role he continued after retirement from the police until early 2009.

Dave has now worked in around 50 countries researching, developing and delivering both anti human trafficking policy and training for UNODC and other international organisations, including the Commonwealth Secretariat, ICMPD, IOM, OSCE and SADC. Although human trafficking is his main area of expertise he has also worked on other topics including migration, financial investigation, kidnapping associated with migratory routes and hate crime.

With international partners and on his own initiative Dave has developed a number of ‘virtual reality’ scenarios using 360° images, often filmed in highly challenging environments. In the last 8 years these have been used to enhance anti human trafficking training for over 2,000 investigators and prosecutors from more than 80 countries.

At the present time (February 2020) Dave’s main geographical areas of interest are Sri Lanka, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa/ Eastern Africa migratory routes. Particular topic interests include kidnapping of migrants for ransom, human trafficking for removal of organs and creating training for low resource/ low literacy environments

He holds a Master’s degree in Advanced Learning Technology and is currently working with a UK university and young international developers to create a ground breaking mobile human trafficking training ‘app’ based on his earlier work.