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Report all missing children
to FBI crime center

THE ISSUE Dozens of police departments have failed to report all runaway, lost or abducted children to an FBI database.

POLICE departments in Honolulu and elsewhere apparently have violated federal law by making judgment calls about whether to report missing children to a federal database. An examination of the practice by Scripps Howard News Service has prompted a review of that policy. Honolulu police should begin entering all cases of missing children into the database.

The news service's study of computer files at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children found that dozens of police departments failed to report at least 4,498 runaways and lost and abducted children to the FBI's National Crime Information Center since Jan. 1, 2000. The failure apparently violated the National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990.

The Honolulu Police Department entered only 10 missing children into the FBI database during that period, while arresting 2,791 runaway children. "The low number of reported missing children is due to the department's current practice of not counting runaways as missing persons," Police Chief Boisse Correa told reporters in a written statement.

Lt. Brent Hume of the HPD's Juvenile Services Division said the department had adhered to the law's definition of "missing child." However, that definition of a missing child as one who has been "removed by another" from the child's legal custodian is part of a 1984 law aimed at coordinating federally funded programs to locate missing children. It is not part of the 1990 law requiring states to report missing children to the FBI database.

The department contacted the Justice Department after being questioned by Scripps Howard and was told "that runaways are missing persons," said Capt. Frank Fujii. "We are working toward being in compliance with the law."

Of the missing children not entered into the FBI database nationally, the news service reported, 17 are dead and 131 are still missing. One of the dead children was Kahealani Indreginal, 11, whose body was found in a state park near Aiea Heights in 2002. Christopher Aki, her older sister's former boyfriend, was later convicted of manslaughter for the beating death.

Correa said the local FBI office was notified immediately after Kahealani was reported missing. He said police "were able to develop a major lead for a suspect," so he saw little reason to enter the case into the FBI database. That judgment turned out to be correct, but the 1990 law seems to disallow such discretion.

"Police need to report every missing child," said John Walsh, host of TV's "America's Most Wanted," whose 6-year-old son was kidnapped from a Florida shopping mall and murdered in 1981. "Don't make judgment calls! Give every kid a chance to be found and brought home safe."

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