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A Seattle Post-Intelligencer special report on how police here and around the nation fumble missing-person reports, originally published in 10 parts.
Friday, March 14, 2003 Lawmakers, police seek better handling of missing-person cases Widespread failures in missing-person investigations across the state have prompted lawmakers and key law enforcement officials to seek immediate and long-term improvements to a system chronically resistant to change. In the wake of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's 10-part series, "Without a Trace: People go missing, killers go free," top law enforcement officials plan meetings to explore ways to improve communication among police agencies and the handling of missing-person cases, said Scott Blonien, senior assistant attorney general.
The meetings, yet unscheduled, will include representatives of the state Attorney General's Criminal Justice Division, the state's Homicide Investigation Tracking System, the State Patrol and the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, or WASPC, a powerful law enforcement lobby. King County Sheriff Dave Reichert, a WASPC executive board member, said the P-I's yearlong investigation has prompted his own discussions with local community officials about problems revealed in the system. "What you reported on is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cooperation between police departments," said Reichert, who, as lead detective on the Green River serial murder investigation in the early 1980s, has experienced communications shortcomings firsthand in the handling of such cases. The P-I special report detailed how local police -- through ignorance, indifference and lack of training -- repeatedly neglect missing-person reports, allowing cases to go ignored, recovered bodies to be left unidentified and killers to get away with murder. There have been improvements in the past decade, especially in the handling of missing-children cases -- especially those involving abductions. But when it comes to reported runaways and missing-adult reports, a crucial nexus in unsolved homicides, the same "wheel" that investigators have had to reinvent to catch up on cold trails -- stretching back to the heyday of serial killer Ted Bundy in the 1970s and beyond -- must be reinvented now, officials said. "Missing-persons cases and other investigations are not at the level they should be, and I think a lot of these chiefs out there hope that this will all just go away," Reichert said. State Rep. Al O'Brien, D-Mountlake Terrace, a former longtime Seattle police officer familiar with problems in such investigations, said he is researching legislation that would create a statewide missing-person policy. Such a policy should include the use of standardized missing-person report forms by all local departments and elimination of waiting periods for accepting missing-person reports, O'Brien said. Many departments refuse to take a report until an adult has been missing 24 hours or longer. O'Brien, chairman of the state House of Representatives' Criminal Justice and Corrections Committee, said he also will seek more money for the state's Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit -- Washington's records repository for such cases. The unit now has just one employee who is frequently pulled off for other duties. A back-up employee works part time, and the unit also relies heavily on the services of a volunteer -- Northgate dentist Gary Bell, who analyzes dental records that are critical in identifying bodies found. The legislation could be ready for introduction in 2004, O'Brien said. Washington State Patrol Chief Ronal Serpas, meanwhile, said he intends to develop formal training protocols for missing-person investigations. The State Patrol has said it will produce wallet-sized instruction cards to be distributed statewide to officers who can use them as a guide to collecting information critical to such investigations. Serpas also said he plans to improve training materials, including the possible production of a new training video featuring some of Bell's success stories as a way to stress the importance of compliance with state law that requires police to obtain dental records for missing people. The P-I found that police departments routinely fail to get dental records and send them to the state, and that even experienced police administrators were unaware of the requirement. Serpas said many reforms must be made through WASPC and the state's Criminal Justice Training Commission, with each of the more than 270 law enforcement agencies in Washington making individual reforms. "The accountability needs to be with the local department -- as close to the case as possible," Serpas said. Investigators with the state Attorney General's Homicide Investigation Tracking System -- a program that tries to track violent crime statewide to search for patterns and improve communication about such cases between local police agencies -- have said they intend to use the P-I series in its homicide training sessions periodically offered to police across Washington. The HITS program may also seek to expand its database to include more missing-person cases, officials have said. The HITS computer now tracks only those missing-person cases that local police agencies have flagged as potentially involving "foul play." The P-I series found that dozens of missing-person cases never receive such a designation from local departments, however, even though signs may indicate a crime has been committed. Reichert, meanwhile, said he will continue his efforts to act on a statewide study aimed at better sharing police resources and addressing jurisdictional problems. Many failures in missing-person investigations occur "because of turf wars" between departments, Reichert said, pointing to a case examined by the Post-Intelligencer as a prime example. It documented the disappearance of Elizabeth Lamphere from a Kent bar in 1996, and how police in that city declined to take a report because Lamphere lived in Covington -- an area just outside the city in unincorporated King County. Reichert's department took up the investigation, laying down the groundwork for a murder conviction against a Massachusetts trucker after Lamphere's body was eventually found months later in Kent. "This is exactly why we need regionalized cooperation between police agencies," he said. Gov. Gary Locke last year appointed a commission to study that aspect of the problem and WASPC also intends to present the findings of its own study on the issue to a legislative committee, Reichert added. Reichert also said the P-I special report has prompted his office to study the creation of a missing-person policy for all police agencies in King County. The Seattle Police Department already has revamped its missing-person unit and protocols for handling the reports in the wake of the newspaper's reporting. Other departments around the state say they're doing the same. But WASPC Executive Director Larry Erickson cautioned that there is no quick fix on the horizon, and that there are plenty of other law enforcement needs for limited money. In a year locked in a state budget crunch, Locke has yet to say specifically whether he will address the problems in the system. "There are too many unsolved missing-persons cases and too many families who are living each day wondering if their loved ones will ever be found," Locke said in a written statement to the P-I. "It is important that local, state and national law enforcement agencies continue to coordinate efforts and develop better systems to help solve these cases." The P-I's special report found that Washington's missing-person system, while one of the best in the nation in terms of identifying bodies and recognizing patterns among killers, still has ample room for improvement. It also showed that the federal network for tracking missing-person cases is deeply flawed. U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee said he plans to continue his push for a new nationwide missing-person database that would be accessible to medical examiners and coroners, who are now restricted from accessing the nation's main database for unidentified body and missing-persons cases. Proponents say a Web-based system being developed with help from the Kitsap County Coroner's Office -- The Network of Medicolegal Investigative Systems, or NOMIS -- could improve death investigations and better link the anonymous dead to the known missing than the National Crime Information Center computer, the system law enforcement nationwide now uses for such cases. "The sharing of investigative information is now recognized as a crucial part of our crime-fighting abilities, and I am working in Congress to sufficiently fund these efforts," said Inslee, a Democrat whose district includes Kitsap County.
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