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Gaps In An Overburdened System Mean That Children In Foster Care Are Too Susceptible To Abuse

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By Aara Ramesh

A year ago, last October, USA TODAY reported in a bombshell investigation that a foster father in Florida had been arrested in 2019 and had pleaded guilty to charges for rape, molestation, and producing and consuming child sexual abuse material, among others.

Rick Hazel and his wife Shirley were beloved in their community, and over a seven-year period had fostered more than 70 children in their house. In fact, they were the longest-serving foster parents in St. Augustine. It was only when one child came forward with rape allegations that the case came to light.

The case understandably prompted intense scrutiny and backlash when it emerged that caseworkers had not interviewed the children after they left the foster home, and thus had not uncovered the potential abuse years earlier. A system that was supposed to ensure constant check-ins, interviews, and reassessments of the children, parents, and those running facilities failed completely in this case, and possibly in others, the report found.

In addition, Rick Hazel’s foster file revealed a history of arrests and convictions on various drug, assault, child abuse, and drinking and driving charges, some of which were from before he was even approved to be a foster parent. It is unclear whether the allegations were unfounded, but the report states he was convicted or entered a plea for every charge against him, except one dropped marijuana charge. Per state regulations, the cases were apparently too old to disqualify him from becoming a foster parent.

The problem of abuse in the foster system is widespread and twofold. On one hand, children are removed from their biological families because of circumstances out of their control, usually involving something like abuse, neglect, or abandonment. On the other hand, they may be subjected to these same traumas even once they are removed, be at the hands of caseworkers, in some situations, or their foster and/or adoptive families.

In the latter situation, the kind of abuse foster children face can include sexual abuse, molestation, and harassment; overcrowding; verbal and mental abuse; being hit, burned, or locked in confined spaces; starvation; etc. This is an up-hill battle in many ways, as predators are especially canny in identifying vulnerable children and those who may not have any other recourse, such as runaways or those in foster care. Further, fostering may seem like an enticing money-making route for some, as states generally provide some basic form of non-taxable financial assistance for the wellbeing of the foster child.

In today’s piece, we take a look at the loopholes in the child welfare system that can lead to children being abused and how these can be potentially rectified.

How Widespread Is The Abuse?

Says Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, “The rate of abuse in foster care is much worse than official statistics suggest.”

The Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) itself estimates that around “700 to 800 kids have been abused in out-of-home care each year since 2015,” per the report from USA Today. These statistics, however, only include the complaints that are fully verified, not the ones that were deemed partially verified or inconclusive. Further, there is a feeling that the rate of abuse seems to be falling only because the number of foster care placements has been increasing. In analyzing a University of Miami database of child placements, USA TODAY reporters found that more than 600 children had spent some time in the homes of foster parents accused of abuse. 

One John Hopkins University study found that children in foster care in Mayland are four times more likely to be sexually abused than their peers “not in this setting,” with those in group homes being 28 times more likely to face abuse. Another investigation in Oregon and Washington state said that almost one-third of foster children reported abuse by a foster parent or another adult in the home. One estimate from 2013 said that over half of all the children recovered from sex trafficking situations by the FBI were from foster care or group homes.

Damningly, after examining reports of abuse in New Jersey foster homes, one set of researchers concluded that “no assurances can be given” that any foster child in the state is safe. A separate study in the state also found that 37.4% of those who abused children in foster care were institution staff, while 36.5% were foster parents and 20% were relatives of the victim. 

One investigation by the Arizona Republic highlighted that states routinely under-report abuse data to the federal Children’s Bureau. For instance, the report says, in 2014, all 46 of the states that submitted data said that less than 2% of children in foster care had been harmed in the prior year. But surveys repeatedly dispute that claim, showing that anywhere between 25% and 40% of former foster children reported having been abused or neglected while in care.

Last month, Texas was grappling with a state-wide scandal involving unlicensed facilities, wherein children were given the wrong medication for their illnesses, or were deprived of medications altogether; child-on-child sexual abuse was rampant; runaways were common, as was communicating with sex traffickers; young children were being restrained or handcuffed; children were engaging in self-harm or attempting to commit suicide through hanging, cutting themselves, or investing harmful cleaning chemicals.

One official state report found that during the first half of 2021, around 500 children had spent at least one night in a non-licensed state-operated placement. Further, “on average, children spent two weeks consecutively in unlicensed placements, with one child spending 144 consecutive nights in such placements.”

Similarly, West Virginia was struggling with abuse and neglect complaints at out-of-state facilities the state paid to care for foster kids, and in fact, renewed contracts despite internal investigations revealing abuse. 

In a particularly egregious and extreme example, just a few days ago, two foster parents were arrested in Louisiana on second degree murder charges after the 17-month-old baby girl in their custody died after she was repeatedly shaken and struck.

Children can also face abuse from other parts of the system, like from state or private child welfare organization employees. For instance, in February 2021, a former caseworker with New Jersey’s child protection agency pled guilty to charges of producing child pornography with an underage boy between March 2017 and April 2019. Court documents said the man “did knowingly employ, use, persuade, induce, entice or coerce” the victim to “engage in sexually explicit conduct.”

The U.S. Foster Care And Adoption System In Numbers

A child is removed from their biological family and placed into adoption or foster care only in the most dire of circumstances. It is in a child’s best interests to remain in a stable household instead of moving repeatedly between foster families, group homes, and/or institutions. The preferred outcome is for children to be reunited with their biological parents in a stable household whenever possible, but the next best case scenario is for them to be in a stable home with other relatives or in an adopted family.

Part of the increase in the number of children in foster care and looking at being adopted is the opioid crisis, which ravaged communities all across the country, hitting Appalachia and Native American tribes the hardest, and which is now disproportionately targeting Black communities.

Per the latest available preliminary data from the Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families (ACF), which looks at the 2019 financial year, there were 423,997 in foster care as of Sept. 30, and around 251,359 entered foster care over the course of the financial year. The mean age of the children was 8.4 years old; 52% were male and 48% were female. Racially, 23% were Black, 2% were American Indian/Alaska Native, and 44% were white.

Of those who entered the system in 2019, 63% did so due to neglect, 34% due to parental drug abuse, and 7% due to parental incarceration. The average time a child spent in care was 19.6 months. ACF reports that between the 2012 and 2017 financial years, the numbers of children in care on the last day of each fiscal year increased. Well over 80,000 children in the system lived in institutions, group homes, and other environments, instead of with a foster family.

​​Image source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Children’s Bureau

The issue of adoption has wide-ranging effects on society. Per some estimates, just under one in every three Americans has some experience with adoption in their immediate family, while six in every ten say they have a personal experience adoption, “meaning that they themselves, a family member, or a close friend was adopted, had adopted a child, or had placed a child for adoption.” Further, more than one-third of all Americans have considered adoption themselves. 

Discounting private and intercountry adoptions, the government says the number of children waiting to be adopted from the foster care system has increased over the last ten years. Around 140,000 children are adopted by American families each year. Excluding step-parent adoptions, over half (59%) of the adoptions were made from the child welfare system. Per a 2012 report from the U.S. Children’s Bureau, between 1% and 5% of all adoptions fail, leading to kids ending up back in the foster care system.

The Vetting Process

The choice of a foster or adoptive parents is imperative and crucial to children who have been removed from their biological homes as a result of serious abuse, neglect, and trauma. For them to develop fully on a mental and physical level, they need to be placed in a good home with well-trained and well-equipped caregivers.

With children being so vulnerable, it is no surprise that there are stringent laws and requirements in place for anyone who wants to foster or adopt a child, or — for that matter — anyone who wants to work in an area involving child welfare, be it social workers, teachers, childcare facilities, juvenile detention or correctional centers, nurseries, and sometimes with mentorship or youth programs as well. There are some specific felony convictions that authorities are on the lookout for, such as physical assault, child neglect, drug abuse, child abuse, etc.

The federal government, as well those in states, localities, and territories, have their own standards for background checks for prospective adoptive and foster parents. Many also require that any other adult living in the house also have a background check done, with some requiring one of anyone in the house over the age of 12.

The background check process includes criminal record checks and fingerprint-based checks of national crime information databases. This is done on the local, state, and federal level. Further, some states could also require a check of any child abuse and neglect registry, juvenile court records, incident reports of domestic violence, and any sex offender registry. In some states, authorities may even check Tribal and/or military records for offenses. Some require it for the state the family is currently living in and any other state they have lived in for the last five years, others may ask for it from any state the individual has ever lived in.

There are multiple levels of official and unofficial checks that are done throughout the process, apart from just the criminal record check. These include confidential references; family assessments; and home safety checks, all of which must be done before the license is issued and a child placed within the home. Usually, the checks need to be done before a child can be placed in the home and they apply regardless of whether the child is being placed with a non-related foster family or with kinship caregivers. 

The Gaps In The System

The functioning of the child welfare system involves a large number of people, from the families and children themselves, to law enforcement, the criminal justice system, child protective services employees, etc. Experts say, however, that many of these individual systems are overstretched and suffer from a lack of resources. In this intricate system, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks.

For instance, social workers can have anywhere between a handful and up to 30 cases to manage at a time, depending on the location. Social work is also an area that suffers a high employee turnover rate, causing even more strain on new and old employees. Though most jurisdictions require caseworkers to visit the houses roughly once a month, there are a not-inconsiderable number of reports of caseworkers only being able to visit once every few months, sometimes stretching up to a year. One study found that in West Virginia, 40% of foster parents surveyed said their official caseworker visited the child only every three months or less frequently.

Similarly, law enforcement may also be understaffed, and the public attorney assigned to a child could themselves be dealing with up to 100 clients at a time. Similarly, due to a lack of prospective families willing to foster or adopt a child, those that do often have multiple children to take care of at any given time. Group homes and institutions, too, suffer from resource crunches.

In theory, background checks are supposed to be a frequent process, but in reality, it is periodic at best. There is the initial qualifying check itself, and after that whenever a license needs to be renewed, which could range in duration, from a year to sometimes even longer. Individuals are also theoretically supposed self-report any major life changes, like if they are shifting homes, have their own biological child, an immediate family member dies, etc.

However, it is important to note that in most cases it is only disqualifying if a person is convicted of a felony in certain specific categories, not if they have been arrested or accused, if the charges were dropped or dismissed, or — in some cases — not even if a plea agreement was reached.

So theoretically, a person can be arrested and then still have custody of a child for up to a year before the issue comes to light, if it ever does — a situation that is beyond troubling to all involved in child welfare.

What Can We Do?

There is no doubt that the foster care system is crucial. Children do need a place to stay that they will be safe in while their biological families recover from whatever adversities they may be facing. But experts say the current system of self-reporting from children and families is simply not good enough.

For instance, they point out, children may not want to speak up out of fear that they may be removed from a place where they are somewhat comfortable or semi-stable, or if they are worried about going to a group home, or if they have been placed with family and don’t want to be separated. As the Rick Hazel case shows, parents cannot be trusted to self report, nor can the system of occasional background checks suffice. 

It is hard to allocate blame or say anyone is at fault here. The system is overstretched and understaffed across the board, employees are overworked, there are not enough families willing to take in children, and the number of kids in the system is only likely to grow, what with factors like the opioid epidemic and the Covid-19 pandemic, which has left a shocking number of children without a primary caregiver.

Like with everything else, of course, Covid-10 has only exacerbated the situation, further burdening an already broken and struggling system. Lockdowns and school closures have cut children off from non-caregiving adults who may have been able to spot signs of abuse or neglect. Further, foster families have faced increased economic hardship and potentially unemployment. Doctor visits have transitioned online as well, cutting off another avenue for abused children. Even case workers are less able to visit homes and conduct their inspections and assessments. Families, too, have been cut off from support systems, training, peers, and resources, aggravating their stress. Private and non-profit organizations dedicated to child welfare may have been bankrupted or forced to shut down due to the economic downturn or a loss of funding.

It seems, then, that there is a need for real-time, technology-driven updates on changes in employees’ and foster families’ criminal status, one that does not require a concerned person to seek out information, and one that does not rely on a period system to catch changes. This is true for the welfare of the children in the system, who are each of them vulnerable, and it is especially true in cases involving developmental disabilities or abuse from a biological family. 

You can find full vetting requirements, on a state-by-state basis (updated as of Sept. 2018) here. 

The CDC Is Funding Research Into The Gun Violence Public Health Crisis For The First Time In A Quarter Century

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By a Biometrica staffer

With the Covid-19 virus and vaccines having underscored the importance and strategic role played by objective scientific research, many, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky, are saying it’s time for us to invest in more studies on gun violence.

Earlier this week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a report that concluded that the number of murders in 2020 in the U.S. jumped 30%, up 4,901 to 21,570 total homicides. What was particularly worrying was the fact that just over three in every four of those murders (around 77%) involved the use of a firearm. It was the first time that figure breached the 75% mark, though it has been inching up for several years now.

At the same time, the violent crime rate rose around 5% (the category encompasses murder, assault, robbery, and rape). Per experts, though this is still below the historic highs noted in the 1990s, it is the largest single increase in yearly homicide rates since record-keeping began in the 1960s. 

Research from the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which tracks 7,500 sources on a daily basis for their comprehensive database, shows as of Sept. 30, there have been a total of 33,378 gun deaths in the U.S. this year (covering homicides, murders, unintentional deaths or injuries, and suicides). They estimate the number of total injuries at 30,698. For comparison, in 2020, the GVA says there were 19,411 deaths and 39,492 injuries; and 15,448 deaths and 30,186 injuries in 2019.

According to research commissioned by CNN and carried out by the GVA, this summer has been particularly violent in terms of gun-related injuries and deaths, with weekends being especially bloody. Each weekend, the GVA estimates, there have been an average of 200 deaths and 472 injuries. This evens out to about 3.4 people shot every hour every weekend.

These statistics corroborate a general feeling among law enforcement and the public that violent crime has increased drastically this year, something that has been particularly jarring after what seemed like a quiet year on that front, when much of the news cycle and mindshare was consumed by the Covid-19 pandemic. This recent uptick has thrown back under the microscope what President Joe Biden has called a “public health epidemic.”

What is different, experts say, is that the issue is slowly being reframed, pivoting the gun violence problem into “a matter of injury prevention,” and not of politics. It is, they say, a grave threat to public safety and health.

Many are pointing out that while it’s the high-profile mass shootings, like the recent one at a Kroger store in Tennessee, that draw media attention, gun violence is not only about preventing mass-casualty episodes. Nor is it about “gun control” measures like taking away firearms or establishing a national registry, they add. 

Rather, academicians and experts hope that further scientific research will help craft better and more effective policies. There is limited evidence that any of the measures being debated at the moment would truly be effective in curbing gun violence. Research is key to figuring that out. To truly solve the problem, experts say, we need to understand it and its scope first.

It may be hard to believe, but there are some aspects of gun violence that are actually understudied and under-reported, according to some. At the center of this information black hole is the fact that shooting incidents that result in deaths are actually eclipsed by those that result in injuries (debilitating or otherwise). In addition, mass shooting events claim fewer lives every year than other types of gun violence, though they are the ones most likely to garner attention.

The CDC divides the causes behind firearm-related injuries into several categories, including intentionally self-inflicted; unintentional; interpersonal violence; and legal intervention, which covers incidents involving police or other law enforcement agents acting in the line of duty.

Per the CDC, gun violence is among top leading causes of death for people of all ages in the U.S. The agency estimates that in 2019 there were 39,707 firearm-related deaths nationwide, amounting to about 109 deaths per day. Six out of ten of these were suicides, and just over three out of ten were homicides. “Guns are the leading method of suicide in the U.S., accounting for half of all suicide deaths,” per some estimates. Further, around two in every three firearm-related deaths in the U.S. are suicides.

However, as the agency says, “more people suffer nonfatal firearm-related injuries than die.” One study found that between 2009 and 2017, there were on average 329 firearm injuries per day, and that people were twice as likely to be shot and injured than die.

This is a problem in the long-term, for the victim who survives, the economy, and the healthcare system. Consequences include cognitive problems experienced by the individual, instability in emotions, physical disabilities or paralysis, chronic mental health problems like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and — crucially — a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that can lead to more death and injuries. Some estimates say that gun violence costs the U.S. around $280 billion annually in lost productivity, and insurance, legal, and medical expenses.

It is all these factors that drive the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC), which for decades has been investigating the impact of gun violence on Americans’ health and safety. After limits were put on it in terms of fully studying this epidemic in the 1990s, just recently the NCIPC has started funding on-the-ground research into various associated topics for the first time in a quarter century.

CNN reported in August that the agency is already spending over $2.2 million on tracking, in real time, how many people are coming into emergency rooms with nonfatal gunshot wounds, how the wound was inflicted, whether it was intentional, etc. In addition, the agency is spending over $8 million on 18 different research projects to prevent gun-related violence and injuries.

The areas being studied include the effectiveness of suicide awareness programs, campaigns about the storage and safe use of firearms, and various forms of violence intervention and prevention programs; the characteristics of firearm violence; and “the risk and protective factors for interpersonal and self-directed firearm violence.” One project in Houston is hoping to map hot spots for gun violence in the city, in the same way that epidemiologists are doing with Covid-19.

In the same vein, earlier this week, the Justice Department announced it had awarded almost $187 million in funding to support state, local, and tribal public safety and community justice activities.

Protecting The Elderly From Abuse, Neglect And Fraud: A Legislation Round-Up

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By a Biometrica staffer

In July, we wrote about how millions of elderly Americans become the victims of some kind of financial fraud or internet scam each year. And those numbers are not inclusive of the kind of abuse and neglect senior citizens experience, which can also often be connected to some kind of financial motive. What makes matters a little more complicated when it comes to elder fraud and abuse is that seniors are generally viewed as being less inclined to report it, says the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). They may not know how, may be too ashamed to, or may even be concerned that their families and relatives would lose confidence in their abilities.

Senior citizens lost $1 billion to fraud in 2020 alone. Elder abuse is an issue that affects at least 10% of older Americans annually, the FBI says, per an NBC article. In 2020, the elderly experienced all manner of frauds and scams, with the number of extortion victims topping the list, according to a report published earlier this year by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Americans over the age of 60 reported over 21,000 incidents of extortion in 2020 with losses amounting to over $18 million, the IC3 report added. It’s only apt, then, that policymakers consider bringing in new legislation to further protect the elderly from being scammed, robbed, abused, or neglected. In this piece, we take a look at seven bills that seek to address this public issue.

All bill numbers are per the 117th session of Congress (2021–2022).

H.R. 2922 — Elder Abuse Protection Act of 2021

The bill in brief: It gives statutory authority to the Elder Justice Initiative, which coordinates activities of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to combat elder abuse, neglect, and financial fraud. It requires the DOJ’s Elder Justice Coordinator to serve as the head of the initiative. The bill also requires the initiative to establish a national elder fraud telephone hotline, promote civil legal aid to victims of elder fraud and elder abuse, and make resources available online in English and Spanish.

It was introduced in the House on April 30 and passed/agreed to with amendments in the House on June 23. The bill has 12 co-sponsors so far. For the related Senate bill, click here.

The long title of this act is “to amend the Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act to authorize the Elder Justice Initiative, to require that online resources of such initiative are made available in Spanish, and for other purposes.”

You can find the full text of the act here.

H.R. 4969 — Elder Justice Reauthorization and Modernization Act of 2021

The bill in brief: It aims to reauthorize funding for programs to prevent, investigate, and prosecute elder abuse, neglect, and exploitation, and for other purposes.

It was introduced on Aug. 6. The bill has two co-sponsors so far. For the related Senate bill, click here.

The long title of this act is the same as its brief.

You can find the full text of the act here.

H.R. 1565 — Senior Security Act of 2021

The bill in brief: This bill establishes the Senior Investor Taskforce within the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The taskforce must report on topics relating to investors over the age of 65, including industry trends and serious issues impacting such investors, and make recommendations for legislative or regulatory actions to address problems encountered by senior investors. It also says the Government Accountability Office must report on the financial exploitation of senior citizens.

It was introduced on March 3. The bill has six co-sponsors so far.

The long title of this act is “to create an interdivisional taskforce at the Securities and Exchange Commission for senior investors.”

You can find the full text of the act here.

S. 337 — Stop Senior Scams Act

The bill in brief: The bill seeks to establish a Senior Scams Prevention Advisory Group, which must create model educational materials to train employees of retailers, financial-services companies, and wire-transfer companies on how to identify and prevent scams that affect seniors.

It was introduced on Feb. 22. The bill has three co-sponsors so far. For the related House bill, click here.

The long title of this act is “a bill to establish a Senior Scams Prevention Advisory Council.”

You can find the full text of the act here.

H.R. 982 — Seniors Fraud Prevention Act of 2021

The bill in brief: This bill directs the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to establish an office within the Bureau of Consumer Protection to advise the FTC on preventing fraud targeting seniors and to assist the FTC in monitoring the market for mail, television, internet, telemarketing, and recorded message telephone call (robocall) fraud targeting seniors.

The bill goes on to say that the office must:

  • Disseminate to seniors and their families and caregivers information about the most common fraud schemes, including methods of reporting complaints either to the FTC’s national toll-free telephone number or to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network, where complaints become immediately available to the FBI, state attorneys general, and other appropriate law enforcement agencies
  • Provide, in response to a specific request about a particular entity or individual, publicly available information regarding the FTC’s enforcement action
  • Maintain a website as a resource for information on fraud targeting seniors

It was introduced on Feb. 11. The bill has two co-sponsors so far. For the related Senate bill, click here.

The long title of this act is “to establish an office within the Federal Trade Commission to prevent fraud targeting seniors, and for other purposes.”

You can find the full text of the act here.

H.R. 4401 — Protecting Seniors from Health Care Fraud Act of 2021

The bill in brief: It seeks to direct the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General to report annually to Congress and the public on healthcare fraud that targets seniors.

Specifically, the bill asks that the report include:

  • The 10 most prevalent health care fraud schemes targeted at seniors
  • Steps being taken to combat such schemes
  • Policy suggestions to improve protections for seniors.

Additionally, the bill says the report may omit information or details that would compromise an ongoing investigation or would serve criminals rather than seniors. The report must be posted on certain agency websites and disseminated to Medicare beneficiaries, as specified.

It was introduced on July 7 and doesn’t have any co-sponsors yet.

The long title of this act is “to amend title XVIII of the Social Security Act to distribute additional information to Medicare beneficiaries to prevent health care fraud, and for other purposes.”

You can find the full text of the act here.

H.R. 446 — Protecting Seniors from Emergency Scams Act

The bill in brief: It requires the FTC to report on, and increase awareness regarding, scams targeting older adults. It is similar to H.R. 982: Seniors Fraud Prevention Act of 2021.

Per the Protecting Seniors from Emergency Scams Act, specifically, the commission must:

  • Report on the number and type of scams that target older adults and provide policy recommendations to prevent such scams;
  • Revise the commission’s web portal with current information about such scams, including contact information for law enforcement and adult protective services agencies; and
  • Coordinate with media outlets and law enforcement to disseminate such information.

It was introduced on Jan. 25. The bill has 10 co-sponsors so far. For the related Senate bill, click here.

The long title of this act is “to require the Federal Trade Commission to submit a report to Congress on scams targeting seniors, and for other purposes.”

You can find the full text of the act here.

What Happened To The Serial Killer Phenomenon That ‘Terrorized’ And ‘Captivated’ An Entire Generation?

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By Aara Ramesh

Lately, it seems like violent crime, missing persons cases, and murder have been dominating the news cycle. For instance, the disappearance and homicide of Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito, and the subsequent hunt for her missing fiancé has captured the internet’s attention, with people on forums like Reddit and TikTok scrambling to try and “solve” the case before law enforcement does. Some even commented that they were waiting to see the Netflix documentary that would inevitably be made about the case.

At the same time, the news has also been inundated with experts opining on the reasons behind the rise in violent crime in the U.S., even as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) revealed that the number of homicides increased 30% in 2020, as compared to 2019 — a height last reached in the 1990s and the first time in four years that the number of violent crimes increased on a year-over-year basis.

This all comes against the backdrop of America’s longstanding and enduring fascination with true crime, one that — in some cases — borders on obsession. Since the advent of the podcast Serial in 2014, the cottage industry of true crime content has exploded, be it through hundreds of other podcasts (see, in particular, The Last Podcast on the Left or the questionably titled My Favorite Murder); true-to-life documentaries made by Netflix, HBO, et. al.; long-form essays and investigative journalistic pieces; TV shows like Criminal Minds and Mindhunter; short TikTok videos from Gen Z; or YouTube videos of people applying make-up or cooking while discussing gruesome murders.

But while the genre continues to grow and diversify on a daily basis, ranging from white collar or property crime series, to ones exploring alleged cults and shady organizations, the staple of true crime has long been serial killers.

The so-called “Golden Age” for American serial killers is widely believed to be between the 1950s and 1990s. Since then, there has been a marked decline in the number of active serial killers and a corresponding increase in the public’s fascination with them. The noms de guerre are beyond familiar to many of us — Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Zodiac Killer, the Night Stalker, the Golden State Killer, the Green River Killer, the BTK Killer… the list seems almost infinite at times.

Most of these cases, you may notice, are decades old. The average person would, in fact, be hard-pressed to name a prolific serial killer from the past twenty years, which can largely be attributed to increased information sharing between law enforcement across jurisdictions, and the tools that they have at their disposal. In today’s piece we look at the technological and societal factors behind the disappearance of America’s serial killers.

What Is A Serial Killer, Officially?

So what is the definition of a serial killer?

There have been many different definitions posited by experts in various fields, from law enforcement and criminal justice personnel, to clinicians, academia, and researchers. The points of contention are usually centered on the number of murders involved, the motivating factors, and the duration and frequency of the killings.

The official term seems to have been coined by FBI agent Robert Ressler in the 1970s, though the accuracy of that is not readily verifiable. The FBI itself, in the mid-2000s, put forth their own simple categorization, mainly for the purposes of statistical analysis. According to the Bureau, serial murder is defined as “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.”  

Further, according to the agency, it is hard to pinpoint a single identifiable motivation or factor that would prompt someone to become a serial killer (not even psychopathy). It goes on to add that “the most significant factor is the serial killer’s personal decision in choosing to pursue their crimes.”

This is one of the reasons that the FBI says these cases pose “significant investigative challenges” to law enforcement agencies. Another is that these cases tend to bring heightened scrutiny to law enforcement’s actions, due to an “over-abundance of attention from the media, mental health experts, academia, and the general public.” At the same time, police and federal agents themselves struggle with inaccurate anecdotal evidence passed around their circles, as well as the fictionalized versions of such killers they may encounter in their regular lives.

The So-Called ‘Golden Age’

Per the FBI’s estimates, serial homicides are exceedingly rare, accounting for less than 1% of all murders committed in a year. On average, serial killings would account for just around 150 deaths per year, with the FBI estimating that there are anywhere between 25 and 50 serial killers active throughout the U.S. at any given point of time.

The patterns, however, are clear. There was a notable and significant spike in the proliferation of serial killers a handful of decades ago. But then, at the turn of the millennium, that phenomenon seems to have died down significantly.

During the 1980s, one study says, there were almost 770 active serial killers in the U.S., a number that dropped to just under 670 in the 1990s. That rate fell to around 400 in the 2000s, and was estimated at just over 100 over the 2010s. Around 189 people were murdered by serial killers in 1987, compared to 30 in 2015, according to one estimate. These numbers cannot be all attributed to better record-keeping and more reporting, experts say.

There are many who argue that as long as humans have lived together in established societies, there have been serial killers. Fables and history alike are littered with examples. The trend noted in the mid-20th century, however, has been linked to the societal upheaval brought about by two back-to-back World Wars and the horrors associated with them.

It also mirrored a general increase in violent crime in the U.S., experts say. This could be for many reasons; for instance, people were moving around more at that period, particularly as a result of their jobs. People were less likely to know their neighbors as well. There was a mass migration demographically, as well as between the inner city areas and the suburbs.

Another interesting factor that has been suggested for this high degree of serial murders is the introduction of the interstate highway system, beginning in the 1950s. The increased connectivity gave some “a wider geography to roam and kill.” Practices like hitchhiking were common, as were young runaways, who often left home due to generational clashes with their parents at a time when various social movements were taking off. All of this made it easier for murderers and victims alike to slip through the cracks.

Culturally, some point to the explosion in pulp fiction and true crime magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, which were wildly popular and tended to have heavily sexualized and violent imagery.

All these factors blended together to create a particular phenomenon that “terrorized and captivated” one generation and fascinated the next.

But Where Did They Go? 

It may seem contradictory, that just as people were developing a fear and obsession with serial killers, they began to disappear.

There are many factors that could have influenced this. The biggest, however, seems to be technological improvements in investigative processes.

This extends beyond just rapid developments in forensic technology like DNA testing or psychological profiles put together by the FBI’s famous Behavioral Analysis Unit. One basic improvement has been just in information sharing. In their heyday, serial killers could cross state lines and murder with impunity for years on end, because police in various jurisdictions did not have a common database to pick up patterns or similarities between cases. Look, for example, at Ted Bundy’s multi-state spree after two escapes from imprisonment, or the Golden State Killer’s decade-long rape and murder spree across various cities and counties in California. 

Today, crime detection does not lag quite so much. There are also federal, state, and local computerized databases that help investigators identify patterns and similarities between crimes across geography and time. In 1985, the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) began working on a common database that evolved into the Violent Crime Apprehension Program (ViCAP), which is today used all over the country, by law enforcement departments of all sizes to track and link violent crime like sexual assaults, kidnappings, homicides, etc.

In 2009, the Bureau also created the Highway Serial Killings initiative, which aimed to boost coordination between various agencies when it came to light that there was an epidemic of women going missing or being assaulted or murdered at highway truck stops or service stations.

In addition to these initiatives, there have been developments like the AMBER Alert system and the FBI’s Child Abduction Rapid Deployment teams, all of which can be credited with tightening the investigative process and making it more difficult for serial offenders to go undetected.

There are other factors at play as well. For one, the growth of various forms of media and the spread of the internet meant that more people were aware of potential killers in their vicinity and were more likely to be vigilant. As their notoriety grew, the potential victim pool shrunk. People became more careful of travelling on their own, hitchhiking faded into obscurity, parents were less likely to let their children play unsupervised out in the street, and so on.

There is also the fact that our connectivity has increased significantly. It would be rare to encounter someone who doesn’t have an internet footprint or smartphone today, both of which make it easier for law enforcement to retrace the victim’s last movements. More houses are also equipped with home security systems. Some estimates suggest that as of 2019 there were around 70 million surveillance cameras installed in the U.S., roughly amounting to one camera for every 4.6 people.

There are those who argue that the nature of mass violence has shifted as well, particularly since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 and the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. These events, some say, changed the way we approach and perceive murder. Rather than the stereotypical serial killer, we now have different types of mass murderers, be they foreign and domestic terrorists, lone wolf gunmen, or school shooters. On the other hand, most experts believe that the psychological and motivational profiles of serial killers and mass shooters or terrorists are vastly different, so it is not accurate to trace an evolution from the former into the latter.

Another intriguing reason, some say, is that as our understanding of what leads someone to a life of crime has expanded and improved, so too has our ability to detect early signs in children and adolescents. It is generally believed that serial killers develop their personalities and proclivities at a young age, and that by the time they’re 14 years old, they are “basically fully formed.” While this is far from an exact science, psychologists are able to identify the potential long-term effects of experiences like family dysfunction and sexual abuse, and intervene early. 

Are They Gone?

So, are serial killers a thing of the past, relegated to the annals of history, like telegrams and floppy discs?

This remains an enduring question and one without concrete answers. The way we perceive and label serial murders has changed. On the one hand, we are constantly linking unidentified remains to serial killers who are long dead.

Just a week ago, a sheriff’s department in Mississippi announced that it had identified the skeletal remains of Clara Birdlong, a woman who was found dead almost 44 years ago in December 1977, and that it had linked her murder to Samuel Little, the most prolific serial killer in U.S. history.

It was only in December last year that Little died at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, where he had been serving three consecutive life-without-parole sentences for murdering three women in the late 1980s in Los Angeles. The FBI in 2018 labelled Little America’s most prolific serial killer ever, having been on the receiving end of 93 murder confessions from Little. The man said he strangled his victims over a nearly four-decade period between 1970 and 2005.

On the other hand, the nature of serial murders has changed, as mentioned above. In its report this week, the FBI said that a worrying number of the homicides noted in 2020 were committed with firearms. Serial murderers are less likely to strangle or hack someone to death; they may be choosing handguns instead.

There are some who believe that there is such a serial killer loose in St. Louis, where there has recently been a series of fatal shootings of sex workers, which authorities say could have been carried out by the same person. The are, understandably reluctant to characterize it as the work of a serial killer, though that is the term being bandied about by social media users and some citizens of St. Louis.

With the way things have been playing out, then, it seems like the familiar and age-old terror of murder has not disappeared — it’s just taken on a new form.

You can find a comprehensive, unofficial database of serial murderers here.

Majority Of People Worldwide Vulnerable To Organized Crime, Warns Global Organized Crime Index

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By a Biometrica staffer

The Global Organized Crime Index paints a “worrying picture of the reach, scale and impact of organized crime in 2020.” The data driven analytics tool evaluated 193 United Nations member states. The 2020 report, the first published by Global Initiative, found that a majority of people worldwide lived in countries with high levels of organized crime.

There are “widespread shortcomings in global levels of resilience to organized crime, from weaknesses in criminal justice systems to rampant corruption and violent crackdowns on the freedom of the press and civil society,” the report added.

The Global Initiative was formed in 2011-2012 after off the record discussions in New York between officials of law enforcement agencies from developing and developed countries. It is an independent civil-society organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

The two primary metrics the index uses are criminality and resilience to organized crime. It then assigns a rating score between one and 10 for both these metrics.

The United States was accorded a criminality score of 5.5, making it 66th of 193 countries, higher than the global score of 4.88. The human trafficking score for the US was 5.5, just below the global score of 5.58. In this, the United States was 92nd of 193 countries.

When it came to the heroin trade, the US was particularly vulnerable, and placed at No. 23 in the world with a score of 6.5, well above the global average of 3.97. The story was similar when it came to cocaine, with it pegged at 7, placed in the 22nd position, again significantly higher than the global average of 4.52.

The picture was even more grim when it came to the trade in synthetic drugs, with the US coming in at 7.5 compared to a global average of 4.62, placing it 14th out of 193 countries.

When considering mafia-style actors, too, the country is somewhat vulnerable, and was placed at the 54th position with a score of 5, in comparison to a global average of 3.89.

Criminal networks were also found to be very active in the United States with an assigned score of 6.50, above the global average of 5.45, putting the country in the 47th position worldwide.

It was also found that foreign actors had a significant presence in the US. with the country receiving a score of 5.5, putting it in the 80th place.

Despite the U. S. proving to be significantly vulnerable across so many parameters, it came in at 6.58 in terms of resilience against organized crime, placing it 28th out of 193.

The report observed that 2020 was a particularly challenging year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, as organized crime pivoted to changing scenarios.

“In the face of lockdowns and travel restrictions, criminals not only retooled their regular business, but also exploited new opportunities presented by the global health crisis,” the Index observed. “Individuals, communities and businesses struggling to stay afloat also became increasingly vulnerable to organized criminal behaviour, either as victims or as perpetrators, albeit more often than not due to the absence of any viable alternatives.”

This echoed the views of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) that had warned the pandemic had brought about new opportunities for organized crime groups (OCGs).

There’s a “parallel pandemic” of crime threats linked to Covid-19, INTERPOL Secretary General Jürgen Stock warned at the start of 2021. As INTERPOL reminded everyone on its Covid-19 safety guidelines page: “Criminals don’t take breaks. Even as everything around us is being put on hold, they are looking for new ways to generate profits.”

Examining The Opioid Crisis In Native American Lands

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By Aara Ramesh

In the face of the real and present danger posed by Covid-19, the opioid crisis, America’s long-standing other epidemic has fallen under the public radar, though it continues to ravage large swathes of society. Experts say that, as with most socioeconomic problems, communities of color — particularly Indigenous ones — have been disproportionately affected by the nationwide opioid crisis.

The existing problem was, in a way, both exacerbated and mirrored by the Covid-19 pandemic. Overall, recent provisional data from the CDC revealed a nationwide surge in overdose deaths during the pandemic. Per this data, deaths from drug overdoses increased 30% between 2019 and 2020 across the country. It marked the worst annual death toll recorded by the government since the start of the opioid epidemic in the 1990s.

Much like with the opioid epidemic, the nation’s largest Indigenous tribes suffered some of the country’s highest per capita rate of Covid-19 infections. This strained an already under-resourced healthcare system, and compounded the harmful impact of other crises. In today’s piece, we take a look at how and why the opioid epidemic was so devastating for Indigenous communities, and what that meant for them in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Native Americans And Opioid Addictions

Some estimates suggest that Native Americans are at least twice as likely as the general population to become addicted to drugs and alcohol. They are also around three times more likely to die of a drug overdose. Native Americans had the highest rates of overdose deaths in 2003–2013 from prescription painkillers and illicit opioids among all racial and ethnic groups, per data from the CDC. The rate of overdose deaths among Native peoples has increased almost six times since 2000, also faster than seen with any other group.

Analysis by the Washington Post concluded that between 2006 and 2014, “Native Americans were nearly 50 percent more likely to die of an opioid overdose than non-natives.” Per the Post’s reporting, at the peak of the opioid epidemic in the mid-2010s, the rates of fatal overdoses among Native Americans were on par with those seen in Appalachia, which houses some of the communities most crippled by drug addictions. 

Image source: The Washington Post

One 2014 study by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that “the use of heroin and of the widely abused opioid painkiller OxyContin by American Indian 12th-graders was about double the national average.” Nationally, the rate of fatal drug overdoses is about 12 out of 100,000 for white people and around 11 among Black people; the rate among Native Americans in the state of Washington is at 29.

In the Cherokee Nation alone, opioid-related fatal overdoses more than doubled in the eleven-year span between 2003 and 2014. The Nation estimates they lost at least 350 members out of their total population of around 375,000 over that period. Per a lawsuit filed by the Cherokee Nation, “the tribe logged 10 admissions to drug treatment centers and 32 emergency room visits.”

For context, Native Americans make up only 2% of the U.S. population. What’s worse, it is quite likely that overdose deaths within Tribal communities were under-reported and undercounted. Further, as a result of the epidemic, the social infrastructure was completely overwhelmed by the opioid epidemic, straining Tribal medical, welfare, law enforcement, and foster-care systems.

Image source: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Why Are Native Communities So Badly Affected?

The factors behind the higher rates of addiction within Native communities are manifold. Some tribal leaders and health experts attribute the high rates of opioid addictions within Native communities to the fact that more prescription pills were being shipped to Tribal lands than almost anywhere else in the country. This could have been for a number of reasons, they say. One is that Native American tend to suffer more injuries than the average person from working in labor-intensive industries like farming, logging, and fishing.

In addition, many Native Americans living on and off reservations lack adequate access to healthcare, mental health resources, and addiction recovery services. Their communities are often more physically isolated, smaller in size, and located in rural areas. This affects the healthcare infrastructure on a serious level, and results in a lack of nearby long-term, non-pharmacological treatment options for pain and injuries. 

As sovereign nations, Tribes are responsible for their members’ healthcare and social service needs, the funding for which largely comes from their tribal revenue. Tribes, however, are more likely to be under-resourced, putting them at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to being able to best care for citizens.

On another level, however, it is important to note the effects that Social Determinants of Health (SDH) have on Native peoples. SDH are the “complex, integrated, and overlapping social structures, policies, and economic systems” that lead to health inequities. These could be physical like poor transportation and poor housing, or could be more abstract, like gender inequality, poverty, and structural racism.

People who don’t have a steady income may turn to drug use to cope; not having shelter may lead to or exacerbate an existing drug problem. Research has consistently shown that childhood experiences of alcoholism, drug abuse, and domestic violence in caretakers; physical and/or sexual abuse; emotional neglect; and a parent or family member being in prison are more likely to lead to a child developing behavioral or mental health problems in the future. It also makes them more susceptible to drug addictions.

Unfortunately, such “adverse childhood experiences” are all too common in Native American communities. Much of this, experts say, is the result of inter-generational trauma, which has been passed down over and over, and which has compounded over the course of the last several centuries. In addition, due to historical factors, rates of poverty, homelessness, and lack of education are also higher than the national average  among Native American communities. 

The Parallels And Intersections Between Covid-19 And The Opioid Epidemic

Nationally, the fatal overdose rates had actually started falling in 2018, but ramped up in the months leading up to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact, the CDC estimated that the rate of opioid-related fatalities in Native Americans was slightly lower than that of white populations just before the pandemic last year.

However, the biggest spike in overdose deaths was noted in April and May 2020, just as unemployment rates were beginning to skyrocket, fear and stress were ramping up, and stringent lockdown measures were being introduced.

The primary drivers of the spike last year were singled out as illicitly manufactured fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which are extremely potent and deadly. Many overdoses also involved stimulant drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine, which reduce a person’s tolerance of opioids, making the increasingly ubiquitous cocktail of drugs even more dangerous.

In fact, researchers have recently tried to shed light on the worrying surge in the number of deaths linked to methamphetamine, which rose roughly 180% between 2015 and 2019 across the country. Native Americans have the highest rates of methamphetamine use disorder of all racial and ethnic categories. Increasingly, street supplies of methamphetamines are cut with fentanyl. Researchers also found that behaviors are likely to be more risky when it comes to methamphetamine misuse, in terms of using needles to inject it and combining it with other drugs like fentanyl.

In the context of the pandemic, what is of particular concern is what happens when society returns to “the old normal.” Dr Mike Brumage, former director of the West Virginia office of drug control policy, told The Guardian, “Once the tsunami of Covid-19 finally recedes, we’re going to be left with the social conditions that enabled the opioid crisis to emerge in the first place, and those are not going to go away.”

The Indian Health Service (IHS) points out that “opioid crisis and COVID-19 pandemic are intersecting with each other” in an insidious way. On one hand, the use of some opioids can lead to respiratory and pulmonary problems, which then makes a person more susceptible to catching Covid-10. Vice versa, having a chronic respiratory disease is likely to increase the risk of fatally overdosing on opioids. Diminished lung capacity as a result of Covid-19 could also lead to similar outcomes among people already on opioids.

On the other hand, isolation and lack of access to recovery support services due to lockdowns and restrictions. Away from peers, mental health services, financial instability, loss of jobs, disrupted routines, stress, housing instabilities.

Research has consistently highlighted a link between poor economic conditions and drug addiction and overdose death rates. This can include increased unemployment, as was seen during the height of the pandemic, or a general, sustained economic downturn — something that has been noted in the U.S. over the last several months. 

One of the biggest factors behind the higher risk of fatal overdoses is social isolation, which was the prime characteristic of last year’s Covid-19 lockdowns. In addition to spurring fear and stress, as a result of social isolation, people are more likely to imbibe drugs on their own, and are less likely to have someone around to administer naloxone or to call 911. In desperation and need, they also tend to turn to less reliable suppliers and lower quality products, especially if they are under financial constraints from job losses as well.

Further, on an infrastructure level, lockdown restrictions, isolation protocols, and economic downturns have affected the in-person delivery of addiction recovery services and “drop-in” clinics, limited the number of people that can be treated at facilities, and has even bankrupted some facilities that serve rural or small communities. Providers dependent on private and state funding, or Medicare and Medicaid programs, have also seen their budgets severely slashed by the recession and fall in patient volumes.

Resources have overwhelmingly been directed towards fighting Covid-19. The pandemic has “robbed the oxygen out of the room and made it the sole focus of what’s happening,” according to Dr. Brumage. For instance, a $1 billion research project that hoped to create pain treatments less addictive than opioids was frozen by the federal government.

All of these problems, data, history, and trends tell us, are likely to be disproportionately affecting communities of color — and Native American ones, in particular. The full extent of the effect of this pandemic on the opioid crisis is not yet clear, and researchers will likely take several months — if not years — to deduce the damage really done.

FBI Data Shows Major Spike In Murders In The U. S. In 2020

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By a Biometrica staffer

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its Unified Crime Report for 2020 on Sept. 27, and it showed that the number of homicides increased by 30% from the previous year. There were more than 21,500 homicides reported, a height last reached in the 1990s.

This is the largest single year increase in murders in the years for which the FBI has statistics, stretching back to 1960. Additionally, the murder rate in 2020 was about 6.5 per 100,000 people, about 40% below what it was in the 1980s and 1990s, when homicides peaked in the United States, CNN reported.

The FBI noted that rate of homicides escalated in the summer months, peaking in June and July, and then did not really relent for the rest of the year. The FBI report shows that homicides increased in all geographies, in small towns, suburban areas, and in big cities. Worryingly, at least 77% of these homicides were committed with the firearms. The report also showed that the homicide rate had spiked, even as crimes in other categories did not rise to a similar level. 

“The FBI data is showing an increase everywhere. It’s urban. It’s rural. It’s Democratic. It’s Republican,” Shani Buggs, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies community violence prevention, was quoted as saying by the Guardian. “What I’m hearing on the ground, from folks in New York, Chicago, Oakland, Louisville, St Louis, is that you have mundane issues that are turning lethal because there is so much anger, and rage, and guns available.”

There were other experts who pointed to the Covid-19 pandemic and related stresses as having contributed to this spike in homicides.

“It took one pandemic to unveil another pandemic, a more silent pandemic,” Malik Russell, the director of communications for the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention told the Guardian. “It’s important that the nation as a whole doesn’t miss the forest for the trees, the fact that every year, thousands and thousands of people, disproportionately Black and brown, are being killed on the streets.”

The spread of homicides across the country, according to the report, was also a cause for concern for Jeff Aser, a data consultant who studies crime rates. “In the 90s, New York and Los Angeles accounted for 13.5% of all murders nationally. Last year, it was under 4%,” Asher told NPR. “So it’s a lot more diffuse than it was in the 90s. It was bad everywhere. There’s not a good murder takeaway there.”

The FBI collects crime statistics from law enforcement agencies while putting together this annual report, but it is important to note that agencies are not required to submit data. In 2020, 15,875 agencies out of 18,000 participated, which meant that about 15% did not.

Last year, the FBI began publishing quarterly national crime reports, but this year they are yet to release any quarterly reports. A reason for this is that only 53% of agencies submitted detailed crime information via the NIBRS system. The FBI said they required at least 60% of agencies to participate via the NIBRS system in order to produce quarterly national crime reports.

In 2020, violent crime was up 5.6% from the 2019 number, the FBI said in a release. Property crimes dropped 7.8%, marking the 18th consecutive year the collective estimates for these offenses declined.

The UCR Program collects information on crimes reported by law enforcement agencies regarding the violent crimes of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, as well as the property crimes of burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson.

Into The Abyss — How People Go Missing In America’s Wilderness

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By Deepti Govind

At Biometrica, one of our key areas of focus is missing persons. We’ve repeatedly published pieces on this tragic epidemic — from the intersection of internet vigilantism and missing persons of color, to federal government measures, to how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) handles missing children cases, to pieces on missing and murdered indigenous people and children of color, and even some that offer an inside look at what it takes to be a canine handler working in Search and Rescue (SAR) and Search & Recovery. People going missing is the “nation’s silent mass disaster,” the Department of Justice’s National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) website says.

In our previous pieces, we’ve already mentioned that, per NamUS, around 600,000 children and adults go missing and 4,400 unidentified bodies are recovered each year in the country. The disaster of missing persons has been in the limelight over the past few weeks because of the case of Gabrielle “Gabby” Petito, a 22-year-old lifestyle vlogger (video blogger) from Long Island, who was reported missing by her family around Sept. 10 while she was on a cross-country road-trip with her 23-year-old fiance Brian Laundrie.

It has also brought to the forefront, albeit to a more muted reception, the issue that cases involving missing persons of color do not receive the same media attention. For instance, hundreds of indigenous people were reported missing in Wyoming, where Petito disappeared, but their cases have not been met with the same furor. Between 2011 and September 2020, 710 Indigenous persons were reported missing in Wyoming, according to one report.

There are 20,698 missing persons cases, 13,818 unidentified persons cases, and 11,941 unclaimed persons cases still open and unresolved in the United States, according to NamUS. But what remains a bigger mystery is how many of those persons went missing in America’s vast wildlands. Even in Petito’s case, for instance, her body was found in the Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. The initial determination by the FBI for Petito’s manner of death is homicide. Neither the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, nor the Department of Agriculture’s US Forest Service keep track of people who go missing in the wild, says a New York Post article.

Over the past several years, many media reports on the number of people who have gone missing in the wild appear to cite a single, somewhat unlikely source: Bigfoot hunters. In 2011, David Paulides, the founder of the North America Bigfoot Search, launched a database of wildland disappearances that occurred under “mysterious circumstances,” the Post article adds. Based on Paulides’ research, there are at least 1,600 people missing in the wild somewhere in the United States.

According to Paulides’ data, per the Post article, most people disappear in the late afternoon and during or just before severe weather. Bodies are often found in previously searched areas, and often without clothing or footwear. Children are sometimes found at improbably far distances from the point where they went missing. Handling missing person cases is hard enough in urban areas, where there’s a chance that there could be several witnesses who may have last seen the individual who went missing. Needless to say, going missing in the wild complicates the SAR process a whole lot more.

In this piece, we examine in brief a couple of cases of people who have gone missing in the wild (selected at random), in a bid to answer how it happens, and the even more elusive why.

1997 — Amy Wroe Bechtel

In 1997, Amy Wroe Bechtel was a 24-year-old Olympic Marathon hopeful living in Lander, Wyoming. She went for a run and never came back. Even today, 24 years later, she remains officially missing and her case is unsolved. After all these years, there’s barely been any evidence other than what was found in her car in the early morning hours of July 25, 1997. Those weren’t much either: her sunglasses, her car keys left on the driver’s seat, and a to-do list — a small scratch of paper, an article by Jon Billman in Runner’s World said in 2016.

Billman is the author of the book The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America’s Wilderness. He is a former wildland firefighter and high school teacher. Amy Wroe Bechtel’s case is one of several Billman has covered.

Back to 1997 and Amy’s case: On the day she disappeared, her white Toyota Tercel wagon was parked by the side of the road where the Loop Road splinters out to the smaller, pine-shrouded Burnt Gulch turnoff. There were puddles below the driver’s door and behind the vehicle, but no footprints, and no tire tracks in the mud. It had stormed the day she disappeared and there was a downpour. If she parked before it had stormed that afternoon, did she get caught in the rain; and where did she go? These were the questions that plagued her loved ones, as well as investigators back in 1997 and that still remain unanswered.

The search for Amy initially began with just her husband Steve Bechtel and two dozen of his friends on the day of her disappearance. But later that same day, it expanded to include ATVs, dogs, dirt bikes, and over 100 volunteers on the ground. The next day horses and helicopters joined in and, by the third day, the search area had been expanded to a 30-mile radius. But not many people who go missing in the wild have this big a search party looking for them.

Amy’s husband, Steve, was the prime suspect in her disappearance for years. But in his 2016 article, Billman says nearly two decades after Amy vanished, it appeared as though there were hardly enough facts to merit such an intense focus on her husband. Fremont County Patrol Sergeant John Zerga was assigned Amy’s cold case file in 2010 and remained the lead detective as of Billman’s 2016 article.

What happened to Amy has stayed a mystery. But the last theory authorities and investigators in the case were working on appears to be the most plausible one, for the moment: that Amy was a victim of a serial killer named Dale Wayne Eaton. Eaton was found by the police just outside the mountain town where Amy went missing, nearly a year after her disappearance. He was wanted for a botched kidnapping of a family of three in Patrick Draw, less than a three-hour drive from Lander.

A series of murders between 1983 and 1997 were all suspected to have occurred at the hands of the Great Basin Serial Killer, but only one of them has been solved: that of 18-year-old Lisa Marie Kimmell or “Lil Miss,” as her case was also called. It was Eaton who was held responsible and sentenced to death for the abduction, rape, and murder of Kimmell. She’s said to have been kidnapped from a remote area in Waltman, Wyoming. Nearly seven years ago, when Eaton was the only inmate on Wyoming’s death row, his sentence was overturned. But he will remain in prison where he is serving a life sentence plus 50 years, writes Billman.

Solving the cold case of a runner who went missing 24 years ago in the wild holds importance even today. It may help other families of possible victims of a serial killer get much-needed justice and closure. A lot of women allegedly vanished without a trace from the Great Basin region of Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. As Billman puts it: “A confession by Eaton may resolve not just Amy’s case but numerous other cold-case mysteries swirling in the abyss of the Great Basin.”

2017 — Jacob Gray

The other case we have picked to examine happened around two decades after Amy’s disappearance, this time in the wildlands of Washington state. Jacob Gray, who was then 22 years old, rode his bicycle during a rainstorm into Washington state’s Olympic National Park and vanished. His bike and camping gear were discovered near the Sol Duc River, but otherwise there was no trace of him, the Post article says. Months of SAR missions made no progress.

As with Amy’s case, this one too caught the attention of Billman. Chief Ranger Jay Shields is said to have told Billman that the odds of locating Jacob were “beyond finding a needle in a haystack.” After all, the park where he vanished spans an area of 3,734 km². And SAR efforts don’t always amount to anything. For instance, take the case of a woman named Kara Moore who went missing in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan’s Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Although dozens of searchers with canines managed to cover 73,000 acres almost immediately, they found nothing. Luckily in that case, Moore wandered home a week later on her own.

When it came to Jacob’s disappearance in Washington, his father Randy Gray wasn’t about to give up, though. According to Billman, per the Post article, Randy went on to “liquidate his world in order to find his son,” by selling his house and closing his successful contracting business. He loaded up a camper with food and gear and invited Billman along as he set out for Washington to find out what happened to his son on his own.

Unlike Amy’s case from 1997, nothing about Jacob’s disappearance suggested foul play. His bike wasn’t damaged, the tires weren’t flat, and there was no evidence he’d been in an accident or purposely hit, the Post article says. But since his parents’ divorce four years before he vanished, Jacob had shown signs of depression and, his family speculated, possible schizophrenia. It concerned Randy and his ex-wife Laura enough that they sent him to Bellevue, Wash., to live near family, attend community college, and look for a job, the article adds.

It took Randy 18 months to finally find the closure that many families of missing loved ones have had to learn to live without on a more permanent basis. On Aug. 10, 2018, a team of biologists who ventured into the mountains to study marmots stumbled upon Jacob’s clothing in a remote area of the park, the Post article says. Rangers searched the area and found his skeletal remains, 5,300 feet above sea level and 15 miles from where Jacob left his bike. The body was identified, but what happened to Jacob has remained a mystery. The coroner called the official cause of death “inconclusive.” His boots were found wrapped in trash bags.

There are several other cases of people who have gone missing in America’s vast wilderness. In another article, Billman lists some of those: 51-year-old Dale Stehling, who vanished from a short petroglyph-viewing trail near the gift shop at Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park in 2013; Morgan Heimer, a 22-year-old rafting guide who was wearing a professional-grade personal flotation device when he disappeared in 2015 in Grand Canyon National Park during a hike after setting up camp; Ohioan Kris Fowler, who vanished from the Pa­cific Crest Trail in 2016 — the list goes on.

We end this piece with a few chilling lines from the excerpt of Billman’s book that underscore why missing persons cases are heartbreaking for everyone who are involved in it: “These are the missing whose situations are the hardest on loved ones left behind … It’s a tricky thing to write about missing persons because the story is the absence of someone. A void. The person at the heart of the story is thinner than a smoke ring, invisible as someone else’s memory.”

Justice Department Metes Out Awards Of Nearly $187 Million to Support Community Safety

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By a Biometrica staffer

The U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has awarded almost $187 million to support state, local, and tribal public safety and community justice activities through the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), a component of the department’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP).

The awards, from the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program, are going to all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Justice Department said in a release.

The JAG program is the leading source of federal justice funding to state and local jurisdictions, the DOJ says. It provides states, tribes, and local governments with critical funding to support law enforcement, prosecutors, public defenders, courts and corrections officers, and community corrections agencies. 

JAG funding also supports crime prevention and education initiatives, drug treatment and enforcement activities, criminal justice planning and evaluation, technology improvements, crime victim and witness initiatives, and mental health programs, including behavioral programs and crisis intervention teams.

“Our state, local and tribal law enforcement partners are at the forefront of public safety in their communities, and their effectiveness depends on a justice system that is fair, equitable and engages the communities they serve,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland. “These awards will help support traditional crime reduction and violence prevention efforts across the country, as well as innovative community violence intervention strategies that increase trust and make communities a full partner in protecting public health and safety.”

“The crime and justice problems facing America today are unique to each community, and so are many of the solutions,” said Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “The awards we are announcing today, and many more to come, can be used by our state and local partners to support crime reduction efforts, diversion programs, reentry services and a wide range of public safety activities that are vital in their efforts to keep communities safe and uphold the promise of equal justice to all citizens.”

The DOJ also announced that the BJA will make 900 awards totaling $85 million, in addition to the state JAG awards that were already been announced.

“Public safety and equal justice are twin, and mutually reinforcing, goals that we have been fighting to achieve,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Amy L. Solomon for the OJP. “The resources we are making available today reflect our unwavering commitment to protecting America’s communities while ensuring that our systems of justice operate fairly, effectively and in a manner that earns the trust of the people they serve.”

Sextortion Complaints Are On The Rise Again, And The Victims Span All Age Groups

Posted on by kmurali@biometrica.com

By a Biometrica staffer

There’s been a large increase in the number of sextortion complaints made to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) warned at the start of this month. As of July 31, 2021, the FBI IC3 said it had received over 16,000 sextortion complaints this year, with losses exceeding $8 million. Historically, teenagers and young persons have been thought of as the main targets of sextortion scams. But per the FBI IC3, nearly half the sextortion victims who submitted complaints in 2021 were in the 20–39 age group. Victims over 60 years accounted for the third largest reporting age group, while victims under the age of 20 reported the fewest number of complaints.

Still that does not mean that young persons, teenagers, or children aren’t more prone to becoming victims of such scams. In many cases involving younger victims, the fear instilled in them by the scammers stops them from complaining formally, or even talking about it to their closest friends and family. According to the FBI, sextortion happens when someone threatens to distribute your private and sensitive material if their demands are not met. And, often, the criminal involved will demand additional sexual images, sexual favors, or money, creating financial and emotional distress for the victim.

In this piece, we give you a broad overview of how sextortion scams tend to occur, and what can be done to protect loved ones, especially children, from them.

How Does It Happen?

As we mentioned earlier, sextortion occurs when a scammer reaches out to a victim and blackmails them, saying their private and sensitive material will be distributed, mostly on online platforms/using the internet, if certain demands are not met. When it comes to adult victims, most who reported complaints to the FBI IC3 this year said their initial contact with the scammer was a mutual decision, normally made using dating websites and apps. But soon after initial contact is established, the fraudster typically requests that the interaction be moved from the website or app to another messaging platform.

The fraudster then moves into the next phase of their scam by instigating the exchange of sexually explicit material, and then encourages the victim to participate via video chat or send their own explicit photos. Immediately after the victim complies, the fraudster blackmails them and demands money to prevent the release of the photos or videos on social media. The fraudster often gains access to the victim’s social media or contact information and threatens to send the images to the victim’s family and friends.

In some cases, regardless of the age of the victim, the scammer’s very first communication with the victim may be a threat. The criminal may claim that they already have a picture or video of you that they will share if you don’t send more pictures.

When it comes to younger victims, predators typically reach out to a young person over a game, app, or social media account, the FBI says in a blog about sextortion published in 2019. Through deception, manipulation, money and gifts, or threats, the predator convinces the young person to produce an explicit video or image. When the young person starts to resist requests to make more images, the criminal then resorts to using threats of harm or exposure of the early images to pressure the child to continue producing content.

There were 1,428 reports of sextortion of minors made to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline between October 2013 — when NCMEC began tracking this disturbing form of online sexual victimization of kids — and April 2016. Of those reports, 78% of the victims were female and 15% were male, while gender could not be determined for the rest. The ages of child victims ranged from as young as eight up to 17 years old.

The big differentiator when it comes to younger victims is that more often than not, the scammer makes them believe that they are talking to someone their own age who is interested in a relationship, or to someone offering something of value. For example, a 32-year-old-man from Georgia masqueraded online as a 13-year-old boy, and later as a 25-year-old man, to coerce a 12-year-old girl to produce child pornography and send it to him. The adult can use threats, gifts, money, flattery, lies, or a number of other methods to get a young person to produce these images. But the minute an adult asks a youngster for a graphic image, even a single one, they’ve committed a crime.

There have been recorded instances of scammers who commit such crimes actually studying how to reach and target children and teens. The FBI blog gives the example of a man in his 40s who worked as a youth minister just so that he could learn how teens talked to each other. He then went on to create social media profiles where he pretended to be a teenage girl. He used that digital avatar to start talking to boys online and encourage them to make videos. Needless to say, he was put in prison for his crimes.

In some cases, scammers offer money or other items of value like smartphones, or even currency or credits in a video game, to make their victims comply. Then there are a few cases where the criminals take the threat to a different level, as with the case of one fraudster who threatened to hurt his victim and bomb her school if she didn’t send him pictures.

How To Avoid Falling Prey To Such Scams

Since most of these scams take place online, one big question that could plague many of us is how do you know who can be trusted on the internet? There’s no simple answer, though. Those who commit this type of crime can have dozens of different online accounts and profiles and may be communicating with many young people at the same time in their search to find victims. A good thumb rule, as with the physical world, is to be cautious whenever you are speaking with someone online whom you haven’t already met in real life.

It’s a rule that’s easier suggested than followed because most of us communicate online from the comfort of our own homes where our defenses are, for obvious reasons, not on high alert. As the FBI puts it: “It’s easy to think: I’m on my phone, in my own house, what could possibly happen? But you can very quickly give a criminal the information and material he needs to do you harm.”

Awareness and sensible safety practices online, along with a willingness to ask for help, can put an end to this type of exploitation, the FBI says. Per the Bureau, there are six things that agents who work on these cases want everyone, particularly younger people, to know:

  • Be selective about what you share online. If your social media accounts are open to everyone, a predator may be able to figure out a lot of information about you.
  • Be wary of anyone you encounter for the first time online. Block or ignore messages from strangers.
  • Be aware that people can pretend to be anything or anyone online. Videos and photos are not proof that a person is who they claim to be. Images can be altered or stolen.
  • Be suspicious if you meet someone on one game or app and they ask you to start talking to them on a different platform.
  • Be in the know. Any content you create online — whether it is a text message, photo, or video — can be made public. And once you send something, you don’t have any control over where it goes next.
  • Be willing to ask for help. If you are getting messages or requests online that don’t seem right, block the sender, report the behavior to the site administrator, or go to an adult. If you have been victimized online, tell someone.

What can be done if someone thinks they’ve fallen prey to a sextortion scam?

The very first thing the victim can do, whenever they’re ready, is to reach out to the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI or report the crime online at tips.fbi.gov. When it comes to younger victims, the FBI itself says if they feel like they’re not ready to speak to the Bureau, they could go to another trusted adult and tell them about the victimization online and seek help. One key point the Bureau asks victims of such scams to remember is that they are not the ones breaking the law. The criminals count on victims feeling too unsure, scared, or embarrassed to tell someone.

There’s no need for fear from the younger victims’ side, even if it started on an app they were too young to be on; even if they felt okay about making some of the content; even if they accepted money or game credit or something else because in the case of minors, it is outright illegal for an adult to ask for, pay for, or demand graphic sexual images from a minor.

The FBI also has some key pointers for parents and caregivers on how to talk to kids about sextortion, titled Three 30-Second Conversations:

The New Version of Don’t Talk to Strangers

  • When you’re online, has anyone you don’t know ever tried to contact or talk to you?
  • What did you do or what would you do if that happened?
  • Why do you think someone would want to reach a kid online?
  • You know, it’s easy to pretend to be someone you’re not online and not every person is a good person. Make sure you block or ignore anything that comes in from someone you don’t know in real life.

The Power of a Picture

  • Has anyone you know ever sent a picture of themselves that got passed around school or a team or club?
  • What’s possible anytime you send someone a picture?
  • What if that picture were embarrassing?
  • Can you think about how someone could use that kind of picture against a person?

I’m Here to Help

  • I read an article today about kids being pressured to send images and video of their bodies to a person they met online. Have you ever heard about anything like that?
  • Sometimes they were being threatened and harassed—scary stuff.
  • You know, if you are ever feeling like something is going on—online or off—that feels scary or wrong or over your head, my first concern is going to be helping you. You can always come to me.

For more information from the FBI on sextortion scams, click here.