Police fail to report missing children

Thomas Hargrove of Scripps Howard News Service analyzed data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to find that "dozens of police departments across the nation failed to report at least 4,498 runaway, lost and abducted children in apparent violation of the National Child Search Assistance Act passed by Congress in 1990. Seventeen of these unreported children are dead, 131 are still missing." Twelve percent of the more than 37,000 children reported missing to the NCMEC between 2000 and 2004 were not reported to the FBI.