CITY — There is no epidemic of missing African-American girls in Chicago, or evidence that black girls are falling prey to sex trafficking in increasing numbers, Chicago Police Department officials told aldermen Tuesday.
The hearing that lasted for less than a hour came 10 months after 6th Ward Ald. Roderick Sawyer — chairman of the City Council Black Caucus — asked the council to dig into data from the police department that he said revealed "a striking imbalance of instance and response to black missing persons" in comparison to white missing persons.
Sawyer's call for a hearing came after the Chicago Reader reported that black women between the ages of 11-21 made up a quarter of all of the city's open missing persons cases as of Aug. 1, 2016. While police Tuesday did not address the race of those reported missing, they said that the vast majority of those cases are resolved quickly.
Deputy Chief James Jones, who is in charge of the department's detectives, said that of the nearly 200,000 kids reported missing in Chicago from 2000 to 2016, 99.9 percent were found.
"One missing child is too many," Jones said, telling the aldermen that police investigate every report, regardless of media coverage — nor the race or gender of the victim.
Sawyer began the hearing by saying he was particularly concerned that African-American girls made up a disproportionate number of sex-trafficking victims.
However, Youth Investigations Division Commander Tom Lemmer said the police department recorded just 25 victims of sex trafficking between June 2013 and July 2017.
In the past year, 2,600 missing person reports have been filed with the police department's Area South detectives — and only five cases remain open, Jones said.
Jones and Lemmer agreed with Ald. Anthony Napolitano (41st) that the hardest cases are those involving a teenager "who doesn't want to come home."
In fact, due to the ubiquity of cell phones and social media, the number of missing person cases filed with Chicago Police are down 64 percent from 2000-16.
In March, an erroneous Instagram post claiming that 14 girls had gone missing in Washington, D.C., in a 24-hour period went viral prompting widespread outrage. While the information was wrong, Mayor Muriel Bowser nevertheless vowed to refocus officials' attention to missing teens.
