D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser Forms Task Force To Find Missing Black & Latina Children

The mayor of Washington, D.C. has issued a plan to find the city's missing children after a viral social media campaign called attention to a perceived uptick in vanished black and Latina girls.

Mayor Muriel Bowser announced Friday that the city will increase the number of police officers assigned to find missing children, and form a task force that will determine which social services are needed to improve teenagers' home lives so they don't run away, The Washington Post reported.

"Often times, these girls are repeat runaways," said Kevin Harris, Bowser's spokesman. "So if we really want to help solve this problem and bring down the numbers, we have to break the cycle of young people, especially young girls, who repeatedly run away from home."

Bowser's announcement came a day after the Congressional Black Caucus asked the FBI to help D.C. police investigate missing children cases. 

Last week, popular social media posts inaccurately claimed that over a dozen D.C. girls had gone missing in 24 hours (below). Some even implied the girls were kidnapped or became victims of human trafficking, or used photos of girls that had already been found.

The posts were later debunked by authorities, the fact-checking site Snopes, and news organizations such as the BBC and NBC Washington.

According to D.C. police, there has not been a mass disappearance of missing girls. The perceived increase in such cases is the result of authorities starting to use social media to publicize the missing children's names and faces. In the past, as the Post noted, posting about the cases was discouraged.

There has actually been a decrease in the number of missing persons reports in D.C. in 2017 compared to previous years, according to BuzzFeed News. Additionally, all of the teens that have been reported missing this year weren't kidnapped — they left voluntarily, police said.

As of Friday, all but 22 of this year's 501 missing children cases have been solved.

But while many of the viral posts are misleading, D.C.'s new task force is very real — and so is the disproportional number of people of color missing across the country.

According to FBI data, 36.7 percent of missing people under the age of 17 are members of a minority.

For her part, Bowser believes the attention the cases are receiving is positive, despite the misleading posts. Harris hopes D.C.'s new task force will inspire similar initiatives across the country.

"This is what the (social media) policy was intended to do,” Harris said. "It was intended to get these teens’ faces out there. It was intended to provoke conversation. We don’t ever want this to become the norm."