Police agencies receive training on finding missing children

HAMPDEN – With 1,000 children abducted each year in Maine and Internet crimes against them rising at an alarming rate, investigators from eastern and northern Maine brushed up Thursday on ways to find missing children.

Although Maine does not have the level of crimes seen in other states, law enforcement agents need to be prepared for the day that a child is abducted in their area, said Detective Mike Webber with the Maine Attorney General’s Office, which sponsored two seminars this week for police agencies across the state.

“This isn’t something you want to learn on the job as you’re going along, because time is of the essence,” Webber said outside the seminar in Hampden, which drew nearly 60 law enforcement representatives. “We know that time is crucial if we want to recover children safely.”

The training was conducted by a representative of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a resource that police officials said they intend to tap into in their efforts to combat abductions.

Law enforcement agencies were encouraged Thursday to develop plans, if they haven’t already, or update plans they do have. The plans detail steps to take and contacts to make when there is an abduction, including what clues to look for and what questions to ask of relatives or suspects.

Most abductions are committed by parents and relatives in custodial disputes, Webber acknowledged. Statistics weren’t immediately available on the number of abductions that occur annually in Maine.

The problem of abductions “isn’t new, but it’s something that our training and our expertise and our skill sets are being forced to very quickly catch up with,” Webber said.

Although such investigations aren’t exactly new, computers and the Internet are adding a new twist to the investigation.

Where once police sought to make parks and schools safe from sex offenders, Internet sites and chat rooms have become the new meeting place for the offenders who see it as a way of remaining relatively anonymous and still getting access to children, Webber said.

Reports of Internet crimes against children in Maine increased 175 percent in 2003-2004 compared to the previous year, an “alarming increase of reports,” Webber said.

With the Internet, “you bring the whole world into your home,” Webber said. “It’s a great tool, but we need to teach our children to be safe on the Internet as we have in our communities.”

For Sgt. Pat Dorian of the Maine Warden Service, the daylong meeting was a chance to affirm what wardens already are doing: learning new things as well as offering a chance to let other agencies know of the search resources the service has available. Wardens have access to trained searchers and cadaver dogs, mapping programs and other resources, Dorian said.

Mostly associated with searching for hikers or others who may have wandered off, such as elderly Alzheimer patients, the Maine Warden Service also has been effective in more urban search efforts, Dorian said after the session.

In 2001, wardens were called to assist in the search for the body of a woman missing for six weeks and found it six hours after organizing a search, he said.

“We were sort of out of our element in downtown Portland in that [investigation], at least we thought we were because we were very accustomed to working in a wooded environment,” Dorian said.