Missing Persons - The Omitted

Image from Jet Magazine

In the 1980's American television shows such as Unsolved Mysteries and America's Most Wanted have featured missing persons cases in their programs. Plenty of these cases were submitted to these programs by local media outlets and authorities following these cases that may have been a warm or cold case. A large number of missing people featured on these programs were not people of color that were missing during the same time period. These missing persons of color were simply omitted.

During the 1990s, established entities such as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) (founded in 1984) made huge changes from older outreach methods such as advertisements on milk cartons when it came to highlighting a missing person’s case. Milk carton cases were heavily criticized for featuring mostly white children. This may have been due to the fact that many independent (and rural) dairies in the United States adopted the practice of publishing the photos on milk cartons. In 1996 the Amber Alert system was created to provide instant notifications that can be pushed to cellular phones. Due to the Amber Alert system and changes in technology, the milk carton method has become obsolete.

The advent of the World Wide Web allowed for the organizations such as the NCMEC to host a database for both active and cold missing persons cases. The NCMEC's database allows for a person to search the demographics for a missing person by location, age, date missing, and race. In addition, the type of case in which children are reported missing (parental abductions, child abductions, or runaways) provide other variables for the user to consider. The center is also an avenue for locating and identifying unidentified decedents. Forensic facial reconstructions and advanced age composites are also part of the technological advances used in part for investigations. A large number of African American, Asian, or other Non-Caucasian children and adults whose cases were hardly or never covered by the media can be found when conducting a search based on race. 

Image from Black and Missing Foundation, Inc.

It is difficult to accurately estimate how many people go missing every year as well as the number of murdered indigenous women.  Mainstream media focuses on caucasians and regularly fail to report missing persons of color.  The question to, "when were black people enslaved," is open ended.  By failing to report the missing of that demographic, to an extent, America is still enslaving them.  Black lives continue to matter, and, since George Floyd, this disparity can no longer be ignored even by caucasians or Donald Trump.

According to the FBI, in 2019 (the most recent full year) there were 87,438 active missing persons cases from the National Crime Information Center (NCIC).  Under the age of 18, there were 237,469 total entries for white children and 154,589 total entries for black children in the United States in regards to missing persons. Given that the total population of black people in the United States is around 13%, black children have been disappearing at an alarming rate. 

News bias favoring missing white children and adult victims has been well documented over the years by social scientists. People can easily recall names such as Elizabeth Smart, Natalee Holloway, JonBenet Ramsey due to extensive media coverage. All three of the aforementioned individuals were caucasian women or girls from upper-middle-class caucasian families. In fact some of the well-known systems and laws that are used in response to missing and exploited persons are named after white females. For example, Megan Kanka (Megan's Law), Amber Hagerman (AMBER Alert), and Dru Sjodin (Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Registry) are some of the few caucasian women in high profile cases whose names were used for such systems that they have become faces of and synonymous with missing persons. The names of missing black children are not pushed to this level of awareness by the media or used for national system. 

Solutions

Ultimately, missing children and adults can have a devastating impact on loved ones regardless of race. In a perfect world scenario the approach to promoting missing persons cases would be treated with equal media coverage. Since we do not live in a perfect world, entities such as the Black and Missing Foundation, Inc. (founded 2008) are a great source to report and search specifically for missing black people. The Charley Project is another foundation that is a great source which provides updated stories to cold case files and links to resolved cases that can be found on their website. In the meantime, the best thing we can do is to post all the links we can find about missing people of color to social media.

Resources Consulted

• 2019 FBI NCIC Missing Person Statistics - https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2019-ncic-missing-person-and-unidentified-person-statistics.pdf/view
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children - https://www.missingkids.org/home
• Black and Missing Foundation, Inc. - http://www.blackandmissinginc.com/cdad/
• The Charley Project - http://charleyproject.org/