10 interesting updates about our missing girls in the D.C. area.  Continue to pray and look out for our girls.

1) Fiction: 14 Girls in D.C. did not disappear in one day. What did we tell you all about believing memes?

2) Fact: Just because 14 girls did not disappear in one day doesn’t mean there is not a problem.  There are currently 22 open missing kid cases in D.C.

3) The public’s concern is that when children of color are missing, police often assume they are runaways rather than victims of abduction. In conjunction, Karimah Bilal, a police spokeswoman stated, “All of the teens who have been reported missing in 2017 left voluntarily”.

4) NBC publicly called out celebrities for spreading misinformation about the teens.  NBC Washington stated, “Actress Taraji P. Henson, rapper LL Cool J and hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons were among the celebrities who shared the post claiming that 14 girls had vanished in a single day.  It is almost as if some media are blaming the public outcry on tweets, instead of the concern of the missing children.

5) Over the weekend police reported that 10-year-old, 4’5″, 60-pound, brown eyed, black and gray haired, Winter Griffin was found “in good health”. Are we glad she was found – of course.  Does the fact that a 10-year old, 60 lb girl went missing for a few days and simply reappeared still alarm us – yes!

“Any time you have a 10-year-old missing for any amount of hours and no one knows where he or she is, that is rules for immediate attention, an alert needs to be sent out. The more time that goes past, the less likely we are to find him or her.” Trayon White- DC Councilman

6) Police say missing kids have to meet certain criteria for an Amber Alert to be issued:

   1)Reasonable belief that the missing was abducted

   2)The child is in danger of injury or death

   3)Specific and descriptive info about the child and the abduction

   4)Missing must be 17 yrs old, or younger

   5)Child’s name has been entered into the National Crime Info Center system

7) police claim currently, none of the missing fit this criteria

8) Police claim that none of the missing are victims of trafficking, kidnapping, or organ harvesting

9) Police also claim that the number of missing cases have actually declined.  2,222 cases in 2014, 2,433 in 2015 and 2,242 in 2016. However, when CNN requested the 2017 numbers so far this year, Metropolitan Police Department did not immediately return requests for comment on those figures

10) On Tuesday lawmakers asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the FBI to “devote the resources necessary to determine whether these developments are an anomaly, or whether they are indicative of an underlying trend that must be addressed.”

Watch Commander Dickerson’s Facebook Live update regarding the outcry to find out what is happening with the missing D.C. Girls