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this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2026
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Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time. They also capture your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points. These cameras collect data on millions of vehicles—regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime. While these systems can be useful for tracking stolen cars or wanted individuals, they are mostly used to track the movements of innocent people.
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It's a fair point, but not really the example they want to make. 99.8% of missing children are safely recovered per the FBI.
Yeah, there's no way that many children are actually disappearing permanently per year - unless you include ICE abductions.
It counts one parent taking a child without the permission of the other, usually during nasty divorces and custody battles. Those get resolved easily but the kid is still counted as missing.
If they went to their friend's house and didn't tell their mom, they're counted as missing.
If they went into the woods to get high, they're counted as missing.
All that needs to happen is a parent freaks out and reports them as missing, and that happens really often because kids want their freedom. Or they just plain forgot to tell you, because forgetting stuff is something that kids do a lot, too.
Yeah, this is actually an argument that QAnon uses. All of those missing children must have been kidnapped by Satanists trying to get their adrenochrome or something.
What actually happens is the kid goes missing, the parent panics and calls the police...and then the kid shows up later, because they were off doing something that they forgot to tell their parents about (or didn't want to tell their parents about).
And the ones who stay missing are often ones who were being abused by the parent and/or had a LGBT identity their parent refused to accept. They weren't kidnapped. They fled.
This is good they are found. What is concerning is why number is so high in the first place. Europe estimates are between 170 to 300 thousands
It's because a missing child is not the same as an abducted child.
If you don't know where your child is, you tell the police. They radio the miscellaneous patrol cars and they inevitably find the six year old trying to walk somewhere silly within a few hours.
That's a missing person report.
Divorce going poorly. One parent thinks the other shouldn't get any custody. So they pick the kid up from school when it's not their turn and go to their parents house. That's a missing person and child abduction.
Basically, it's a category error. We're All tracking the same things, but our huge category has the same name as their narrow one.
I think that’s because Americans are more likely to call the cops in this situation
Apparently 90% of missing children are runaways. Maybe that is more common in the US or maybe it's just differences in counting (for example some countries might count 16 or 17 year olds as adults for these purposes).
It's cataloging differences. The EU number is by outcome, and the US is by how the report started.
The US is saying there were 400k times someone was concerned about not knowing where a kid was for any reason. For the same "stereotyped kidnapping" category the US is roughly the same, with 50-400 per year depending on how you count them.
More than ideal but not a public policy crisis.
So that's still a couple of hundred missing a year?
50-60 not found alive or not found about 1 in 10,000. Vastly less than the number who commit suicide OD or die by guns
Yeah. You guys should get rid of flock cameras AND guns.
and that's an acceptable number
No, it's not acceptable, it's just entirely fails to justify building a panopticon.
Acceptable implies we don't need to do anything. I'd happily spend some tax dollars to try to bring it down.
Presumably, a lot of the 0.2% are with a parent or family member who isn't supposed to have custody. I would imagine that in many cases the kids are being treated well. Just because a parent didn't get full custody in a divorce doesn't mean they're a bad parent, just that in court they couldn't prove that they deserved 100% custody. Kidnapping a kid is a radical step, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the kid is worse off than if they'd remained with the parent who was supposed to have custody at that time.
Others are probably running away from a bad situation at home. It would be good to get them the help they need. But, it's likely that if you just spent more on looking for missing children, they'd simply be brought back home and have to live through whatever made them run away. Sometimes I'm sure the kids are better off at home, but other times they're running away from severe abuse.
There's probably a tiny fraction that are kidnapped by strangers. Say it's only 1% of those that go missing and aren't returned. That's about 12 per year in a country of 350 million. How much extra tax would you be willing to pay (and force everyone else to pay) to reduce that by 1?
Your math is off. You're starting with the number that already excludes things like non-custodial parents and runaways, wandered from care and so on.
The 200-400 number represents the final total of lost or stranger abducted children children, not young adults.
And that number is pretty good for a population of 350 million! It's also 300 children who have been kidnapped and likely face an unpleasant and grim fate.
I would happily charge everyone in the country $0.05/child a year in additional funding to lower that number.
We can keep it budget neutral by canceling a few fighter jets.
Keeping people alive is an easy sell for tax dollars for me, particularly when it's an issue that would actually benefit from coordinated research and expertise. It being children speaks more to the priorities of humans than strict economic accounting, which is why I padded my figure by 80%.
And that's before we even get to a progressive tax system shifting most of the cost towards people who can afford $30-$250 a year in additional taxes.
No, that number includes non-custodial parents and runaways that are returned or come back. The ones who don't are part of the 0.2%.
If they aren't recovered how do you know it was a non-custodial parent?
I'm simply going by the statistics from the people who track those things and using their classification which says 200-400.
I don't know that the specific categorical breakdown really changes my assessment of what I'd be trivially comfortable with paying and charging everyone.
It's reasonable to assume that the mix of situations doesn't change too much. It would be unreasonable to assume that every run-away always returns / is returned, every non-custodial parent is always forced to return the child to the custodial parent. So, there will be run-aways and non-custodial parents in the group that are abducted.
Where are you getting the idea that 200-400 are stranger-abducted?
I'm not sure it's reasonable to assume that the distribution is the same between recovered and unrecovered children. Specifically because it ignores the circumstances observed by the reporting agency, and secondly because we tend to know where the non-custodial parent is.
https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/304794.pdf
I lost my initial source, but this one serves just as well. I had initially been looking at data from the doj and ncmec.
This is from page 27-29 where discuss conclusions, statistics and data source quality (tldr: no significant change)
So, again: I got them by doing a cursory search and then looking at criminal justice statistics.
I'm not sure this has anything to do with the initial thing we were talking about anymore?
Note how it says "This estimate includes episodes with a stranger or slight acquaintance perpetrator in which a child was moved at least 20 feet or held for at least 1 hour"
Obviously a case where a child was moved only 20 feet, or held for less than a day belong in the 99.8% of cases where the child is returned. Even if the child is held for 1 month, that's going to be part of the 99.8% of cases where the child is returned. And, a kid would have to be moved much more than 20 feet to be missed by a search party. So, presumably the majority of "stereotypical kidnappings" result in the child being returned.
What it has to do with what we were originally talking about is that the 0.2% that aren't returned aren't 100% "stereotypical kidnappings". The vast majority of that tiny minority are also a kid running away, or a kid with a non-custodial parent. Only a tiny fraction of that tiny fraction (so maybe in the single digits per year) are kids who are kidnapped by a stranger or slight acquaintance and who never return.
Okay. This is entirely irrelevant to my point that you originally were replying to that I wouldn't call any number of missing children "acceptable", and that I would be perfectly fine spending money to bring the number lower.
https://childfindofamerica.org/resources/facts-and-stats-missing-children/
I'm okay with spending money to reduce the number of permanently missing, killed, long term abducted, or just about any outcome listed.
Your assumption that different outcomes have the same composition as each other isn't founded.
The very fact that the outcome was different is evidence of different conditions. Contextual evidence made investigators put it in whatever category they did, and I defer to them. Your breakdown ignores that the statistics already account for assumed runaways that never came home.
This is all entirely distinct from the point, which was "there's no number of missing children that's 'okay', and it's okay to spend money to lower the number, and we can actually put together rational spending targets that make sense even for rare circumstances, and if our government isn't in the business of finding lost children then what's the point of any of it?"
you might be willing to part with that nickel but I'm not.