Police are looking for a 30-year-old woman who went missing after arriving in California from Colorado, according to a statement.
According to the news outlet, witnesses had seen her at the motel near where the rental car was found. Police say her family is concerned for her wellbeing and that she suffered from depression.
Missing Person Reports Drop to Lowest in Decades
According to FBI data, reports of missing persons, especially missing children reports, have decreased in 2018—the lowest shown in available records going as far back as 1990, as previously reported by The Epoch Times.Nearly 613,000 Americans were reported missing in 2018, more than 424,000 of them were under the age of 18, an almost 6 and 9 percent fall respectively from 2017.
The data also shows an obvious steep fall between 1997 to 2013, where more than 980,000 missing reports in 1997 fell to less than 628,000 in 2013, before picking up again and once again falling in 2018. There has not been a clear explanation for the latest fall in reports.
Robert Lowery, vice president for the missing children division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, surmised that the downward trend may have to do with technology.
Most of the missing children are runaways between 13 and 17, Lowery told The Epoch Times in a previous interview.
“A lot of these children now have, frankly, cellphones or smartphones. They’re also using social media. … The point being that parents are able to find their children themselves much quicker than they had been, before they have to engage law enforcement,” Lowery said.
He added that the improvement of law enforcement investigative techniques to locate missing children could have contributed to the drop. But that doesn’t quite explain the sudden drop in 2018. Smartphones and social media have been popular among youth for more than a decade and there seems to be no indication that law enforcement techniques made a sudden advance in 2018.
