LAST year, among the tens of hundreds of Jamaicans who vanished from their homes and communities, the police have detected an emerging pattern showing that females are at high risk of abduction, and that young girls, particularly those aged 11 to 19, consistently account for the majority of persons who go missing.

Investigators at the Kingston based National Intelligence Bureau (NIB) could not immediately speak to motive, but are mining the data to establish the chief reasons behind the disappearances.

Last year, 1,962 persons went missing, an average of 163 per month.

Females, as a group, accounted for 1,205 of the missing, with 904 or 75 per cent of them falling in the 11 to 19 age bracket, according to statistics supplied by the NIB.

The Jamaica Constabulary, flowing from complaints of police lethargy in conducting searches, has now adopted a more aggressive policy on investigating missing cases, with internal penalties for officers who breach procedures.

The trend of missing young girls continued into the first four months of this year in a tabulation by the Sunday Observer of missing persons reports issued in the Constabulary Communication Network (CCN) daily bulletins of crimes, and using data from the NIB.

The disappearances topped 300.

In January, for example, there were 152 reports of missing persons, with 59 males, compared to 93 females.

Of the females, 71 were in the high risk 11 to 19 age grouping.

In February, of the 101 reports, 42 were males and 59 females; 47 girls fell in the high risk grouping.

The disappearances occurred mainly in the police metro area, which includes the parishes of Kingston, St Andrew and St Catherine, where serious crimes are most prevalent.

The tabulation of the more current figures indicate that a similar number of persons disappear each month, but the Missing Persons Coordinating Desk (MPCD) newly established at NIB, is still to complete its analysis to establish the numbers who are abducted for ransom, for sex, for retaliation over drugs or gang reprisals, versus those who are runaways or persons who go into hiding.

The last report of a missing person was teenager Kimona Sadler, 15, of Joshua Edwards Avenue, Kingston 11, who disappeared May 10. The police reported in a CCN media bulletin on May 11, that Kimona had left home for school and vanished. She was dressed in navy blue tunic, white blouse and a pair of black shoes.

The youngest on the list of missing people for 2006 is a boy of nine, Kevin Bell, from Free Town, Woodford, St Andrew; the oldest, a man of 72, Donald Reid, who went missing on the morning of May 8 after leaving his Ebenezer Avenue, Kingston 20 home for an undisclosed location.

The police, speaking on the basis of their experience, have indicated that some of the missing cases involve females abducted by men who sexually assault them.

“Sometimes (they) kidnap for sex,” said Senior Superintendent of Police Derrick Cochrane, new head of the NIB.

Other cases involve young girls willingly going off with adult men with whom they have relationships, said Deputy Superintendent Lewis Burchell, the intelligence bureau’s deputy director, implying that the sex is consensual.

Children younger than 16 years cannot legally give sexual consent, and even where they are complicit, the man would be guilty of a statutory crime .

“They are just running off with the bus conductors (and) the taximen,” said Burchell.

Other times, he added, they run off with school friends.

“Some of them we find are doing go-go dancing in the rural areas and in the urban areas as well,” said the deputy superintendent.

In the past, such cases were never given priority. But the new policy, implemented January 26, 2006, stresses immediacy and lays out a step by step guide for probing all missing persons cases.

Among some of the known cases of girls “going off” with adult men are those who turn up at Culloden in Westmoreland where young girls and women used to gather to be auctioned off to various night club owners, before the police moved in and clamped down on the trade.

The small eastern Westmoreland community and the female trading that went on there was cited by the United States two years ago as evidence of human trafficking in Jamaica for which the island had faced sanction, possibly in both trade and aid, from the United States.

The police subsequently clamped down on the auctions.

Of the persons who went missing in 2005, some 22 of them have been confirmed dead, while another 1,178 have been reunited with their families – leaving 762 persons still unaccounted for.

Its unclear how many of the numbers who went missing this year have shown up.

Some persons stay missing for years.

Fours years ago, for example, Rodjay King, a little boy, was at the Dunn’s River waterfalls with his family when he disappeared. Rodjay was last seen playing with a ball along the seashore, but a search of the water produced no body. His mother feels he was abducted.

Burchell acknowledges that multiple strategies will have to be developed to curtail mysterious disappearances, part of which involves dissecting the data to get at the motives, a task assigned to the Missing Persons Desk.

But he also stresses on prevention, saying alert families who monitor their young charges can prevent some of the disappearances.

“Parenting is the first thing,” said the policeman, adding that families should inform themselves of the dangers and caution their children on how to react when they are approached by questionable characters.

The NIB desk acts as a control centre for the investigation of missing persons across the island, manned by a team of three police officers, including an inspector, whose job involves coordinating the intelligence gathered in the hunt for runaways and abductees.

It links with all police divisions islandwide, which, under the new policy, are expected to feed information of missing persons to the NIB, and other coordinating agencies and investigative units as soon as the reports are made verbally to the police.

The MPD also links with overseas law enforcement representatives, through Interpol, to partner on cases where foreign nationals go missing in Jamaica or where locals go missing overseas.

Among the policy stipulations is that all reports of missing persons are to be written up at the time of the complaint, that investigations be launched immediately, and treated as a criminal matter until otherwise proven.

“We felt that if the report was taken at the appropriate time then we could be much more early on the investigation so we decided to take a more proactive approach and deal with the matter as the report is made,” said Burchell.

The policy spells out the steps in the investigation (see insert), which involves a risk assessment of the case.

“If there is a possibility, based on the risk assessment, that the victim was kidnapped, abducted or murdered, then the case would be referred to the CIB or any specialist unit assigned with the responsibility for investigating these offences,” said Burchell.

The process of getting other parties involved in the investigation and to help generate intelligence is termed a ‘flash alert’.

The policy now clearly defines a missing person as ‘any individual, who is absent from his or her place of abode, employment or frequency (a location the person usually visits) under any unexplained circumstances and for an unusual time period without any reasonable communication’.

There is also now a clear chain of command regarding how each case is handled, involving collaboration among several categories of police investigative arms – including Police Control, the police information arm CCN, and the Criminal Investigation Branch.

“The divisional head is to manage all activities related to missing persons in accordance with the policy, and to provide all the resources necessary,” said Burchell, quoting from the policy document.

“And then now you would have the divisional intelligence unit, the National Intelligence Bureau, the community relations division, the CCN and the police control centre.”

Police officers, who do not comply with the directives of the policy, are to face disciplinary action, according to Burchell who said constabulary members were informed of the policy requirements over a six-week period.

“It was published in Force Orders prior to now… But I think the policy puts more teeth into it and gives the persons, from the divisional commander to the investigator, a role, which they must comply with,” he said.

williamsp@jamaicaobserver.com

Steps in the investigation of a missing person

. police officer completes the prescribed missing persons report form, recording a comprehensive statement of the circumstances surrounding the person gone missing;

. obtains a most recent photo of the missing person, preferably full-length size.

. in instances where a photograph is unavailable, the police officer should accompany the complainant to the Police National Computer Centre for the production of an electronically-generated photo, using the E-FIT software.

. the police officer, having obtained all information, sends a radio message to the police control centre and makes an entry in the radio message book and the police station diary;

. the officer completes a risk assessment sheet, submits it to the station commmander and advises the complainant of the action to be taken;

. the station reviews the risk assessment sheet for referral to a case investigator, and where the danger level is considered high, the case is referred to detectives for investigation.

. police issue a flash alert to the various agencies.