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SoberSecondThought ago

Okay. So I looked into this problem with Virginia's kids lacking photos when it was brought up last year, and it bothered me a lot back then. Now I can make some fresh observations.

As you noted, Iowa has photos for all its missing kids. But notice something else: Because one went missing in the 1970s, four in the 1980s, one in the 1990s, and two in the 2000s, Iowa really only has two cases open: one from 2013, and one from May of this year. Two cases, that is it.

The same is true in Kansas. More than half of the cases are old, so Kansas actually has just 11 recent cases. Of these, three are from one family where the father took them overseas. Not really an active case. And in Missouri, two-thirds are old, so there are just 22 recent ones.

Meanwhile in Virginia, if we just look at the cases WITH photos, there are 157 current decade ones (since Jan 1, 2011) out of 190 total. This is obviously a wildly different ratio.

Combined population of Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas is about 12 million. Population of Virginia is 8 million. Virginia has about seven times as many current cases, with photos, on a per capita basis. But it actually has slightly FEWER old cases per capita than the other states -- they have 64 for 12 million, Virginia has 33 for a little over 8 million.

Now, one more refinement in our analysis. How many recent cases are still open if we eliminate those from 2017? There are tons of teenage runaways, hundreds of thousands across America, but most are accounted for within less than a year. The answer: Missouri has six, Kansas has seven, including three from that one family, and Iowa has one. Virginia has 36. That's a per capita rate of unsolved but NOT RECENT cases of 4.5 per million in Virginia, and 1 per million in the other states (counting three related kids as one case). And that's ignoring all the 2011-2016 cases without photos, which also number 36. So Virginia has nearly NINE TIMES the per capita rate of unsolved, not recent cases.

I see in a comment below that NCMEC claimed this was because Virginia sends in every case the moment they get it, even without sufficient documentation. That is false. These are cases that are from 1 to 6 years old. They have been documented properly (as we saw by isolating the kids who had photos from those who did not). The explanation might be that NCMEC doesn't efficiently close old cases from Virginia, and that 90 percent of these kids have been accounted for. But I doubt it.

I need to build a spreadsheet and repeat this analysis for all fifty states. But I already know what I'm going to find.

ThisisThat_2 ago

Recall that it's voluntary reporting by state. So Wyoming - with no cases - isn't accurate. Can't run accurate data analysis when you are not comparing apples to apples.

SoberSecondThought ago

Certainly, and thanks for pointing that out. But my main expectation is that no state that does report, will come anywhere close to Virginia. And I expect that should remain true whether we just look at raw numbers, or break it down by time periods.