Fact is, cars are easier to find than missing kids

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By JAN GLIDEWELL

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 25, 2001

Law enforcement, well, except for the FBI and sometimes the Florida Highway Patrol, doesn't usually need anyone to stand up for it, but I heard something the other night that made me wince.

It was during a tease for a television news story about a Hernando County case where a child had been missing for some time. What the anchor said was something like, "Hear how police agencies are more likely to find a stolen car than a missing child."

I guess it works for a tease, but the apples-and-oranges fuzzy logic involved evokes an inappropriate emotional response.

When I advanced the same argument to a missing persons detective a few years ago, he countered with "If you can make children 15 feet long, give them distinctive colors and body styles, require them to have identifying tags on their backsides and an identification number clearly visible in another location, and make sure that they don't disappear willingly and have no constitutional rights, we can probably do just as well as we do with stolen cars."

Make no mistake, having a child go missing is a scary and sad situation. It is a problem that I had already written extensively about when my stepson, at the age of 16, came up missing a few years back.

We knew that he had run away, and despite that those in the business of recovering missing children say a runaway or a child taken by a non-custodial parent is no different than that of a child seen being forced into a strange vehicle -- there are differences.

The latter child is more likely to be at risk than the others, or at greater risk.

My stepson was 16, streetwise, unhappy living in a small town and thirsted for the road. His grandmother kept wanting to know what the police were "doing" about his case.

"Have them put out an all-points bulletin," said my mother-in-law.

All-points-bulletining is out-of-date movie cop talk for what is now, in Florida, called a BOLO (Be On the LookOut).

Those are sometimes issued in missing persons cases, but there is a statistic you have to keep in mind. Back in 1983, the state of Florida had 4,500 active missing persons cases at any given time, and 75 percent of them involved children.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement no longer keeps track of missing persons statistics but there is no reason to believe that things have changed much.

If you have every police officer in the state copying down BOLO information on every missing person (about 98 percent of whom are found or return home within 24 hours) they wouldn't get much else done in the way of police work.

So missing persons cases, except for those where there is a strong reason to suspect that the child is in immediate danger, are generally the subject of what is called a "passive" search, meaning that the system waits for the child (there is no law against being a missing adult) to come into contact with the law enforcement system.

It's imperfect, but with 4,500 ongoing cases, there isn't much else you can do.

The whole missing persons numbers game is interesting when you look at it. In the '80s, organizations trying to raise funds for the entirely admirable cause of finding missing children began throwing around inflated numbers based on some fairly questionable information gathering techniques.

An aide to a U.S. senator looking for an issue in 1982 came up with a figure he got by calling around 50 police departments, most of which did not keep records, and then extrapolating a figure of 1-million to 2-million children supposedly reported annually. When I asked one fundraiser how the figure got to 2-million, she told me it was an estimate based on "that we know the problem is a growing one."

Actually the FBI was keeping statistics at the same time, and found a total of 154,241 persons (not just children) reported missing during the same time period.

That, of course, was back in the days when we still relied on the FBI's record-keeping and truthfulness.

On the personal front, my stepson did turn up, six years later, in the U.S. Army. And it is true that when my truck was stolen last year, it was found by the police in just a few days, but I find nothing strange about that difference.

One was a strong-minded kid who didn't want to be found and looked like millions of other kids. The other one was a purple pickup truck with a license plate on it.

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