How many children are missing in Ohio? Here’s what to know

How many children are missing in Ohio, and is it more than normal?

You may have seen articles in national and international media outlets like The New York Post and The Daily Mail in the United Kingdom calling the amount of missing cases in Ohio, particularly in Cleveland and Akron, "extraordinary" and a "mystery."

Many of the articles focus on a statistic that over 1,000 children have been reported missing from Cleveland and Akron areas in 2023, including 45 in the month of September alone.

But how does that stack up with missing persons statistics?

Over 18,000 children are reported missing in Ohio each year

Each year, some 460,000 kids are reported missing, according to the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency prevention. Although most are located and returned. According to the National Crime Information Center annual report, there are 97,127 total active missing people including adults and children.

According to the Ohio Attorney General's website, there are currently around 900 actively missing children in Ohio this year.

“We know that law enforcement recovers 90% of the children that go missing," Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost said. "With that being said, one kid missing, is one kid too many."

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While around 18,000 children are reported missing on average each year in the past decade, last year missing children reports in Ohio were around 15,500, and the number of cases has declined each year since 2017 except in 2022, which increased slightly from the year before.

In fact, in 2022, the Columbus metropolitan area lead the state in missing children reports according to information from the Ohio Attorney General's Office.

Standard coverage on earlier missing persons uptick spiraled out of control, Cleveland-area police chief says

Throughout much of the coverage, quotes from John Majoy, chief of Newburgh Police Department near Cleveland, have appeared in articles.

Majoy, who is also president of Cleveland Family Center for Missing Children and Adults, said that this is actually the second wave of intense international coverage on missing children in Ohio. It began when the local TV station 19 News, WOIO, interviewed him for a story about an uptick in missing persons cases in the area in May of this year.

The story was picked up by Fox News, and from there, the narrative spiraled.

For example, recent coverage in both Fox News and The New York Post (both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp) continues to use a quote from Majoy that he gave in late May where he said he didn't know if the missing children had been "trafficked or whether they’re involved in gang activity or drugs."

“They started using ‘vanished’ and ‘disappeared’ to the point where (I said) ‘I’m done,’” Majoy said of the of media coverage. “You're making Cleveland look like the missing kid capital of the world.”

The reality, Majoy said, is that most missing children are returned to their families and that reports come in ebbs and flows because of seasonal patterns and there are factors to consider like chronic runaways who create new reports every time.

Now, in the second round of the Cleveland missing children story, he said he's focused on setting the narrative straight.

“We don't want the public getting worried and thinking there's a serial abductor,” Majoy said. “This is not exclusively a Cleveland problem.”

@Colebehr_report

Cbehrens@dispatch.com

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Missing Ohio children: What to know about the headlines