Black BOYS missing in D.C.

NOTE: We show the raw pictures of the missing children below for the sole purpose that there is a chance one of this website's 100k followers knows something about one of their whereabouts.  Please immediately contact (202) 727-9099 or e-mail mpd@dc.gov.

There is outrage among the Congressional Black Caucus as they call on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to have the FBI investigate why there is an “alarming string” of missing Black girl cases in the nation’s capital.  As this “news” became viral, celebrities joined the band wagon.  Olivia Wilde, Kris Jenner, and others.  Amidst the innocent racket though, Black Lives Matter backer Shaun King and others jumped to social media and led to additional awkward mix-ups.  Some of the genesis for this organic spectacle is what the Washington Metropolitan Police (DC Police) says comes down to simply using social media more proactively on missing children cases, and didn't mean to imply that there is a sudden breakout shift for minority girls.  But of course the public row is unsettled for the moment.  The DC Police are generally early and transparent on crime data.  But the scrappy team is also imperfect in their data recording (too many to list here but there are many tabulation and listing errors one needs to be cautious about).  Now we do personally explore every current open missing person case by the DC Police for this article (note that >95% of missing person cases are eventually closed, and that's generally a positive thing in terms of resolving the primary safety of our nation's children).  Our insightful findings are equally mystifying as no one has discovered or brought this up yet: this year the only problematic anomaly is not that the number of Black girls missing has gone up (in fact it has come down progressively), but rather the number of Black boys missing has risen to eclipse it!  If escalating sex-trafficking of young minority women was the original worry, then this new analysis debunks that hypothesis, which is substituted by now other legitimate worries about general missing children statistics.

Statistical principal decomposition is the most advanced technique to be used and can properly isolate independent explanatory factors (eigens) among all the open missing person cases, of which there are many dozens.  Variables such as the date missing, age of the missing person, gender, and race.  The plot is shown below (showing only a couple variables only partially aligned across both vectors with missing year and the other not at all), though it is unlikely to be well understood by anyone other than expert mathematicians.  So we instead summarize the attributes further below in an easier to understand description!

All the open cases from before this year are on the left panel, and this year’s cases are on the right panel.  The two main clusters easily break apart by these time frames as well, which makes this possible.  We then look at the break down among attributes, one at a time (e.g., age, gender, then race). 

And what we see in earlier years is that the missing people were Black and Hispanic girls, roughly in their mid-20s (then there were many girls and many middle-aged adults as well).  However, this year there has been rapid shift towards further Black boys and adults.  Unlike what we see thrown upon us in numerous alarming headlines, the actual facts are simply far fewer Black girls who the DC police have open missing cases over, within the context of less missing people cases generally in the recent years both in Washington as well as nationally.