Mayor Muriel Bowser, Interim Police Chief Peter Newsham, and other D.C. officials held a press conference this morning in light of public concern over missing youth cases in D.C.
Newsham, who Mayor Bowser nominated to become D.C. Police’s permanent leader, said that because the Metropolitan Police Department is embracing a “paradigm shift” by using Twitter more often to publicize missing person reports, people have the perception that cases have increased. But they haven’t, he says. In fact, they’ve gone down so far in 2017.
But the uptick in social media posts has led to the publication of articles like “Does Anyone Care About DC’s Missing Black and Latinx Teens?” published by The Root on Sunday.
“Over the last week, my timeline on Twitter has been inundated with retweets from the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., with photos of missing black and Latinx teens,” Yesha Callan wrote. She noted that within the last week, 10 teens had gone missing but most folks wouldn’t know unless they followed MPD’s Twitter feed, are family members of missing persons or watch the news, “and even I can’t say that I’ve seen news reports of all these teenagers.
Essence Magazine, Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, and other local news media followed up with similar posts.
Those stories are not accurately conveying the reality in D.C., public officials said today. Commander Chanel Dickerson, the head of MPD’s Youth and Family Services Division, said that over the past five years, parents and guardians have reported about 200 missing persons each month. So far in 2017, the number of reports is 190 on average.
From 2012 to 2016, Dickerson said that 99 percent of all missing person cases have been closed. Out of 19,000 cases, 16 remain open.
Of the 708 cases that have been reported thus far this year, 462 are juveniles and 34 of the total remain open, Newsham told reporters.
Mayor Bowser, Newsham, and Dickerson all told reporters that they have found no connection to these cases and human trafficking. Newsham said that most cases involve “a chronic runway,” an individual suffering from a medical condition like dementia, or people voluntarily leaving home “for personal reasons.”
Dickerson said that when she assumed the role in December 2016, she made it a priority “to give the same amount of attention to each and every case” by using tools like social media and press releases.
She said that police officers, hospital staff, and security officers in the city have been able to identify missing people through posts they saw on social media. And she urged more of the public to do so as well.
“It is heartbreaking to see the number of our young people in our city who leave home because they believe there are no other alternatives,” Dickerson said this morning. “I want to let them know that they are valuable assets to our community and we have not counted them out or written them off, we are here to help.”
And MPD will do a better job of making sure that “equal attention is given” when the missing people are found, according to Newsham.
