Group Urges Adoption of Missing Procedures

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children has issued a call for the nation’s public safety comm centers to adopt the model practices they jointly developed with APCO for handling 911 calls that report children in jeopardy. The Center received ANSI approval for the call-handling procedures last year, and now says the state of Ohio has adopted the procedures state-wide. According to the group, 58,000 children are abducted each year by non-family members, and approximately 115 children are abducted and either murdered, ransomed or taken with the intent to keep. In the most serious cases of kidnap murder, 74% of the children are killed within the first three hours, the Center said. Download (pdf) the call-handling standard here.