Post by Sher on Sept 23, 2005 21:44:47 GMT -5
Every 40 seconds a child is reported missing in the United States.
Today, the Idaho Falls Police Department unveiled two new programs to protect children and keep the community safe.
The first is called "A Child is Missing." This non-profit organization assists law enforcement agencies in the search and early recovery of missing children, the elderly and the disabled in the first critical hours of their disappearance.
This is different from the Amber Alert, which only deals with abducted children.
Through the use of a hi-tech telephone system, one thousand homes and businesses can be alerted within 60 seconds of a missing person of any age. The recorded message can be specific to a part of town and urge those getting the message to help find the missing.
Marlin Price, "A Child is Missing": "Many cases they may have already seen the child walking down the street, remember it, call the police, "he went that a way" and that helps locate the child."
Training on the program was held today.
By the end of this year, the system will be serving all 50 states.
In recent years, this has been credited for having 116 successful recoveries.
Funding for "A Child is Missing" is secured through federal, state, and local law enforcement forfeiture funds.
The second police program, announced today, involving keeping better track of convicted sex offenders.
The issue of community safety and sex offenders has been a big topic of state and national discussion after numerous high profile abductions and murders by convicted sex offenders, including the case in Northern Idaho.
There are 155 registered sex offenders living within the city limits of Idaho Falls, and while not all sex offenders stalk children, Police Chief Kent Livsey strongly feels it's the public's right and duty to know if a registered sex offender lives in their neighborhood.
The police chief also feels it's a priority for his officers to be more aware.
Some sex offenders are on supervised probation but many are not required to be supervised.
Starting next month, officers will aggressively seek out every registered sex offender in the city and make sure these men and women live where they say they live, are fully registered and are following the laws. If they're not, they will be arrested. All part of a new push to be prepared for the worst.
Chief Kent Livsey, Idaho Falls Police Chief: "And when we've looked around the country and evaluated the response to these child abductions, one of the problems every agency has when they go into these things is "where are the offenders?" and they spend a lot of time tracking those people down so we figured if we did that on the front end, now, we wouldn't have to try to catch up if a child is abducted so it'd give us a head start."
Chief Livsey says there's no specific problem now, but he wants to be ready for the 'what if's".
The police are not alone in this effort to track down the sex offenders. They will be working closely with the county prosecutor, the sheriff's office and the state probation department.
There is another helpful tool online to track sex offenders and we have featured it on our newscasts before.
I have taken several phone calls from people asking about it so we're featuring it again.
A Utah web development company called Orbizon has developed a sex offender registry that is easy to use and visually shows you - with a map - where Idaho's registered sex offenders live.
It is called mapsexoffenders.com and the website's creator says the information all comes from the state of Idaho's registry.
Mark Olsen: "It allows you to type in a zip code; a city and state of a specific address - plot your home for example - then it will pull up these; it will pull up your home with a blue icon or your location and then it will pull up in red icons all of the sexual predators and sex offenders in that particular area."
You can then see a photo of the offender, and learn about their charges.
Idaho was one of the first states to be a part of this website. Now, 36 states have their registries mapped here.
www.kpvi.com/index.cfm?page=nbcstories.cfm&ID=2520
