Gov. Mike DeWine will establish a statewide missing persons task force in the coming days as a direct response to The Dispatch’s VANISHED investigation.
Along with appointing members to a group to examine how missing persons investigations are handled, the governor said he may also seek legislative change. DeWine said he has ordered his policy advisers to present him with options for legislation within 45 days of the group being created.
“I think the work that you’ve done, the statistics you’ve come up with is … all very valuable,” DeWine said in an interview with The Dispatch on Thursday. “That will certainly inform the working group that we’re going to be putting together.”
On any given day, roughly 1,000 Ohioans are missing, The Dispatch’s VANISHED investigation found. And the number of Ohioans who go missing each year is on the rise, climbing nearly 18% in the past three years from 19,014 in 2021 to 22,374 in 2023, according to data from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.
While DeWine said he didn’t know why more Ohioans were disappearing, he said the task force would take a close look at rising numbers. The task force, he said, would consist of both law enforcement and everyday citizens from around the state.
While DeWine said he knows law enforcement agencies across Ohio are understaffed, he said that shouldn’t be an excuse for not doing something to try to get “better results.”
“Every life is valuable,” DeWine said when asked what he would tell families who feel police didn’t look for their missing loved ones.
DeWine said the group will closely examine how law enforcement uses databases to report and track missing persons after The Dispatch’s investigation, published on Nov. 17, found police rarely use every tool at their disposal to bring Ohioans home.
As of the end of October, law enforcement failed to enter 327 of the 366 Ohio children the state listed as missing a year or more into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) — a federal clearinghouse that has helped solve more than 46,000 disappearances since its creation in 2007. The Dispatch compiled its own database of Ohioans missing for more than a year who had not been submitted to NamUs.
At least 16 states have laws requiring missing persons to be entered into NamUs, according to the Department of Justice. Ohio is not one of them.
“What we have to do is … do a better job of getting information into the databases,” DeWine said. “Databases, as you know from your investigation, are also very important in this whole area of missing persons.”
DeWine said he wants the task force to take a look at whether police receive adequate training to investigate missing persons cases.
Several former law enforcement officers and experts have told The Dispatch that proper missing persons training is lacking in police departments across the country. The Dispatch found that training on missing persons and human trafficking accounts for 14 hours, or roughly 2%, of basic training for peace officers in Ohio.
As of June 30, officers received 40 hours — nearly three times more training — on how to operate a radar gun to catch speeding motorists, a requirement which is set to be removed.
Along with training, DeWine said the task force would examine best practices for finding missing children.
For example, the majority of missing children are labeled runaways. But experts told The Dispatch that term has proven to be a disservice to kids who disappear.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) stopped using the word “runaway” on its posters in 2011 because it made people believe that kids who choose to leave home were not in danger, said John E Bischoff III, vice president of the group’s missing persons division. Runaways are also excluded from Amber Alerts, a practice that some experts criticized.
When a kid goes missing, Ohio police may label the child “high-risk” — a designation that often garners a disappearance higher priority and more immediate attention and resources.
How police do that differs in different jurisdictions though as the cutoff age for the high-risk designation is 10 in Columbus, 13 in Akron and Toledo and 14 in Cleveland and Dayton, according to general orders from each police division. Cincinnati police do not appear to set an age.
“There should be a best practice in regard to that,” DeWine said.
DeWine told The Dispatch he found the number of child disappearances in East Cleveland “alarming” and called it “an astronomical difference” when compared to the per capita rate of missing kids in Ohio’s largest cities.
At least 43 children have vanished from East Cleveland since 2014, a Dispatch analysis of data from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office found. With a population of 13,792, that means 3.1 kids per 1,000 residents have disappeared, which is a far higher rate than seen in Columbus, Cleveland or Cincinnati.
While DeWine said he didn’t know why so many kids have gone missing from East Cleveland, he said he wouldn’t be surprised if issues with the city’s government and decimated police force were related. In July, DeWine ordered state troopers to help patrol East Cleveland after its police force shrunk by half following a slew of criminal indictments of officers.
Although DeWine will appoint the task force himself, he said he’ll consult with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost about missing persons investigations.
Yost has told The Dispatch that missing persons are a priority for his office. Following the publication of VANISHED, Yost said he would continue to support local authorities working to solve cases.
“This is the type of public affairs journalism our communities need,” Yost said. “My heart breaks for those with missing loved ones, especially as the holidays near. … I will continue to listen to the families who have missing loved ones and to the often-overwhelmed law enforcement agencies in need of our help.”
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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Following Dispatch probe, DeWine to create missing persons task force