Police tell CFS groups to do more ‘leg work’

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This article was published 04/01/2018 (3030 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Amid growing concern about high rates of children reported missing from their foster homes, Winnipeg police are asking child-welfare agencies to do more “leg work” before getting law enforcement involved.

A recent agreement between the Winnipeg Police Service and all local CFS agencies aims to reduce the number of youth in the child-welfare system who are needlessly reported missing to police. It clarifies the difference between a child who is absent and one who is missing, and it means enforcing new protocols for group-home staff who were accustomed to calling police each time a child was out past curfew.

“Winnipeg Police Services and Child and Family Services have worked together to create and bring in policy and procedures that support each organization and, ultimately, children in need. The two organizations have clearly defined what is a missing child and this ensures front-line CFS staff are clear on when a child or youth is missing as opposed to absent briefly, under reasonable circumstances,” a spokesman for Manitoba’s Department of Families said in a statement to the Free Press.

Foster children are reported missing from their placements day after day in Winnipeg, many of them chronic runaways who typically leave group homes or foster homes to go see family and friends. They make up the majority of all missing persons in the city.

Between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of all missing-person reports each year are for children in care, accounting for thousands of calls to police annually, according to publicly released WPS data.

Often, the children aren’t really missing. They’re just not where they’re supposed to be. Child-welfare staff or the child’s family and friends may know exactly where they are and how to reach them.

Insp. Kelly Dennison, who’s in charge of specialized investigations for the WPS, including its missing persons and counter-exploitation unit, said the police service receives an average of about 900 missing-persons reports each month — about 30 a day — and consistently, the majority of them are for children in care.

The police service’s most recently released statistics, from July to September 2017, show 89 per cent of missing-persons reports were for children in care. An agreement between the police department and CFS agencies has been in the works for a while, Dennison said, and it started to come to fruition within the past couple of months.

“When we’re dealing with the numbers we’re dealing with every month, those numbers are exhaustive. So we’re looking at it as a division and going, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’ And the better way is that everybody owns up to their part of the investigation, and we need our partners to help us out with this,” Dennison said.

“We’re working with Child and Family Services to really determine the best way to report these cases to the police service and how they should be reported to us to try and alleviate some of the unnecessary time and effort being spent,” he added, explaining these kinds of missing-person reports can take up “hours upon hours” or even days of officers’ time.

A form has been distributed to CFS agencies listing specific questions police will have for staff when a child is reported missing, Dennison said, including whether the group home or foster home has contacted the child’s family, friends or their school, whether the youth has a cellphone or any medical conditions.

“They are questions designed to help us in the missing-persons report, but they’re also questions that we’re asking the agencies to do a little bit of leg work before they just turn it over to the police service,” Dennison said.

Dennison said CFS agencies have been co-operative and agreed to work with police on the issue — the department of Families considers it a “new approach” rather than a policy change.

“What I’m hoping to see is the number of missing-persons files are reduced, because a lot of these youth that run away from their foster home or group home have been located by the agency within minutes or hours and they know exactly where they are… If they phone them and the kid says, ‘I’m not coming back, I’m at Portage Place,’ you know, is that a missing-person file? What we’re suggesting is, maybe that’s not,” Dennison said. “Maybe as staff at that facility, you can get in your own car and go pick them up.”

Officers who work in the missing-persons unit are also tasked with investigating exploitation on city streets, and police are aware of the “definite connection” between children in care and exploitation. Most of the youth reported missing are girls, the police data shows.

“A lot of the youth that are being exploited out there are youth in care and they’re also youth that are missing. So it just seems like a no-brainer to ensure that these officers are working on both of those types of issues because they’re interconnected,” Dennison said.

If a child is absent rather than missing, a response is still required, but not necessarily by police, a Families department spokesman wrote in a statement. No one from the department was available for an interview on the issue.

“Both missing and absent children require action and that is what police, CFS, foster parents, group care and alternate caregivers, as well as the community have been successfully working on. Programs that offer outreach and after-hours services, law enforcement, probation, CFS workers, StreetReach staff, family and alternate care-givers all play a role in this issue,” the statement said.

The police’s agreement with CFS doesn’t put a timeline on when to report someone missing, Dennison said.

“The age-old you’ve got to wait 48 hours stuff, that’s just nonsense. We’ve never had that and we probably never will, it’s just wrong. You can report somebody missing anytime, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a Child and Family Services agency or if it’s mom and dad.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay