2017 NCIC Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics
April 24, 2018
In its recently released Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics for calendar year 2017, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) reported that:
As of December 31, 2017, NCIC contained 88,089 active missing person records.
In 2017, agencies added 651,226 missing person records to NCIC, a slight increase (0.59 percent) from the 647,435 missing person records added in 2016.
Juveniles (those under the age of 18) accounted for 32,121 (36.5 percent) of the added records, and those under the age of 21 accounted for 41,089 (46.6 percent) of those records. (Suzanne’s Law, enacted in 2003, changed the mandatory missing person record entry from under 18 year of age to under 21 years of age.)
More than 650,000 missing person records (651,215) were purged in 2017. Records were purged for a number of reasons:
A law enforcement agency located the individual.
The person returned home.
The entering agency removed the record after determining the information was invalid.
As of December 31, 2017, NCIC contained 8,634 unidentified person records.
Agencies entered 886 unidentified person records into NCIC in 2017, a slight decrease (0.9 percent) from the 894 entered in 2016. Of these, 674 were deceased unidentified bodies, 5 were unidentified catastrophe victims, and 207 were living persons who could not ascertain their identities.
In 2017, agencies canceled or cleared 684 unidentified person records either because the remains were identified or the records were invalid—a decrease of 21.3 percent when compared with the 869 unidentified person records that were canceled in 2016.
