It was nine years ago since the 15-year-old Pearl Pinson disappeared on the way to school in Vallejo. For her father James Pinson, the pain remains as fresh as the morning that his daughter never came home.
“The date that was etched forever forever, and that was the last time someone saw her,” said Pinson.
Lynn Ching understands. Three years before Pearl was missing, Ching's 19-year-old son Sean Sidi said that he went to a nearby park in San Francisco and has not been seen since then, so she “tried to understand the whole thing”.
Missing persons in California
Last year, an average of 163 people per day in the United States were reported to be missing, 19 a day in California and three a day in the Bay Area. However, there are encouraging signs that the technology – and the efforts to contain their abuse by those they would use to lure the vulnerable and to cause them – so that heartbreaking cases are a little less common.
According to an analysis by the Bay Area News Group, the rate of suspicious reports per 100,000 people from 2014 to 2024 dropped by 21%. In California it has dropped by 23%, and in the Nine-County Bay area the decline is even more pronounced, which is 38% back during this period.
The decline in reports of missing persons was primarily the one in which children under the age of 18 were involved, reported the three out of four missing people and identified two out of three in California in California in the past 10 years. At the national level, children under the age of 18 decreased by 24%, while those in which adults were involved rose by 6%. In California, missing children's reports have decreased by 28%, while a lack of adult cases have risen by 5%.
San Jose Police Public Information Officer SGT. Jorge Garibay said that part of the downward trend has had to do with the Covid 19 pandemy in 2020 and activity restrictions that lasted in the next few years. The trend has continued since then, and Garibay said that the technology has also improved reunification efforts, which often shortens the time that remains a person and possibly reduces the volume of the formal reports.
“This includes publicly oriented platforms such as social media, where demands for help or sensitization obligations can quickly lead to traction and mobilize the community support,” said Garibay.
Systems such as the missing advice from CHP and the Alertscc from Santa Clara County offer additional layers of public relations and sending. GPS functions in smartphones and vehicles also enable families or caregivers to pursue movement or location data in real time, and sometimes enable reunification long before the intervention of the law enforcement authorities is necessary.
“In its many forms, the technology can be a significant factor for the timely and more effective results, and these tools provide meaningful shifts in implementing the shift in the communities and the way individuals can claim a more active role in solving or even preventing a missing person,” said Garibay.
Improved psychiatric care also helps to reduce the number of missing persons, Garibay said.
Although there was a decline in the lack of persons, the percentage failure that is not taken into account for each year – 11% of the reported cases in 2024 in the USA – hardly changed. From a decade, it has increased nationally by 21%, but has been 9% since a high point in 2019.
Between 2014 and 2024, the actual number of missing cases in the Bay Area over 213,600. Of these there were 201,300 – 94%. Most counties kept the recreation rates over 95%, especially for children. Santa Clara County consistently turned to a recovery rate of 98%. However, San Francisco recorded a decline, with the recreation rates for adults falling to around 80% by 2024.
Criminal prosecution authorities in the Bay Area recognize the challenges of missing people, especially in large, densely populated cities.
“In general, SJPD has increased in adult cases to an increase in the stronger population,” said Garibay, noting that fighting fighting fights, drug use and voluntary absences often make such cases difficult.
“Although the majority of cases are voluntary and does not affect a foul, SJPD detectives take every case seriously and work hard to ensure that the person is brought back home or that contact is established with their relatives,” said Garibay.
The national center for missing and exploited children, a private non -profit organization that supports the search for minors, has been supporting the case of Sean Sidi since 2013 and supports the family with a case manager and forensic tools, including age progression images.
John Bischoff, an NCMEC Vice President, said that most of the lack of youth cases are ongoing or custody, but there are growing concerns about online losing, in which children of adults, often under false pretext, are lured away. While the technology has proven to be helpful in the search for missing people, it was also a tool for people with bad intentions to make young people victim.
“We see a lot more children who communicate with people who do not necessarily know online, which is a problem,” said Bischoff. “Here you can communicate with someone online, and although it looks as if you had gone alone at home, you may have left it back in advance. You may have hit someone without realizing that this person has bad intentions. It is a problem that we see.”
NCMEC carried out an analysis of the 476 children who were missing for NCMEC between 2020 and 2023 that were tempted online. California had 35 cases and took second place, while Texas had the most missing cases among the states, 68.
Data show that online attracting cases tend to include younger victims with a higher proportion of children under the age of 15, especially the 13 and younger ones, compared to other missing childfalls. The report showed that most children were anchored online by conversations with adults on social media website, messenger apps and gaming sites. The five most common websites with which children were lured are Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Discord and Tiktok.
Sophie Vogel, a spokesman for Meta, said that Meta launched young people on Instagram last September with integrated abbreviations. And in April Meta announced that it introduces similar teenage accounts for Facebook and messenger with additional security restrictions. Other platforms did not respond to a request for comments.
The NCMEC report showed that from 2020 to 2023 on Instagram and Facebook, the instances of the online loose took over while increasing on other platforms such as Snapchat, Discord and Tiktok.
“This is something we adapt for the protective measures in the past five years,” said Vogel. “We have done a lot to prevent undesirable contact between adults and teenagers. For a long time, we adults have not allowed to initiate private news with teenagers, unless the teenager has already followed them. This is important protection.”
For families who qualify about the still missing people, they hope that regular memories of their loved ones will trigger an answer one day, and if not reunification at least some answers.
“We still hope that we will receive this call, we still hope that we will get this tip so that Sean comes to our door and appears alive,” said Ching, who misses her son Sean on May 21, 2013.
Pearl was picked up by a pedestrian bridge on May 25, 2016 by a man without a known connection to her, who died in Santa Barbara a day later, who had no idea her whereabouts.
Last month, on the anniversary of their kidnapping, their family and friends gathered on the bridge to ask for help to find them.
“I fought for the answers for nine years,” said Pinson, “but we'll keep looking for her.” – Silicon Valley, San Jose, California/Tribune News Service
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