WASHINGTON — The black and brown faces stare out from the Metropolitan Police Department’s official Twitter feed, each girl under a red banner with block letters declaring “Critical Missing.’’ Their names speak of unseen corners of the nation’s capital, a world far removed from lobbyists’ power lunches and legislative dealmaking.
Osharna Pittman, 13, last seen wearing a burgundy T-shirt, white jeans, and a pair of silver Puma tennis shoes. Seyauna Parker, 14, last seen on March 23, her eyes downcast and sad. Keyara Edwards, 15, in braids and a smile. Anjel Burl, 16, her red hair tucked into a soft yellow knit cap. Each post contains a simple query: “Seen her?’’
In those faces, Commander Chanel Dickerson saw a reflection of her own childhood here, and of an 11-year-old neighbor whose mother had sold her into prostitution in exchange for drugs. So when Dickerson was promoted to lead the department’s Youth and Family Services Division in December, she decided to “get the word out,’’ she said.
It worked. The hashtag #MissingDCGirls started trending on Twitter, fueled by social media posts from celebrities, including rapper Ludacris and actress Viola Davis. A member of the city council declared an “epidemic’’ of missing girls, and hundreds of angry residents came to a town-hall-style meeting, demanding to know what was going on.
At the Capitol, members of the Congressional Black Caucus asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the FBI to investigate. On Wednesday night, dozens of community activists and parents — including the mother of a 12-year-old who said she struggled to get help from the police when her child went missing for a week — gathered outside the African American Civil War Memorial for a Protect Black Kids candlelight vigil.
In truth, there is no surge in disappearances; reports of missing children here have actually declined over the past year. But in this city of haves and have-nots, the uproar has exposed a part of the capital the rest of America rarely sees and it points to a deeper and more nuanced problem: at-risk youth, disproportionately black and Latino, whose lives and struggles — sometimes involving sex trafficking — are often ignored by public officials and the media.
“There is no epidemic in the nation’s capital of people being snatched,’’ Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, a Democrat, said in an interview this week, after announcing steps to improve social services and police response, prompted by the public outcry. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t children that need our help.’’
The police say 2,242 children were reported missing here last year, down from 2,433 in 2015. Dickerson says 99 percent of the children are found, and that many are running away from difficult situations at home. As of Wednesday, there were 18 open cases of missing young people, all of them children of color. Half were girls.
Nationally, about 35 percent of missing children are black, and roughly another 20 percent are Latino, according to Robert Lowery, vice president for the missing children division of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. In that regard, he said, Washington is not “unique or out of the ordinary.’’
Elsewhere in the country, the sudden flurry of social media posts have prompted a painful conversation about how law enforcement and the media treat some of the most vulnerable Americans: young black and Latina girls.
“The bottom line is there is an antiblackness, an antibrownness that exists in every conversation you could ever have about social issues in our society,’’ said Tamika D. Mallory, a civil rights activist in New York. “And if you allow white media to tell your story, it won’t be told.’’
That frustration is a major reason the #MissingDCGirls hashtag exploded. Danielle Moodie-Mills, whose Twitter profile describes her as an “equality advocate,’’ strung some images of missing girls together in a single post that asked, “Can someone explain to me how 14 black girls go missing in 24 hours in DC and it’s not a goddamn news story?!?’’ Her figures were off, but the post was one of several that went viral and prompted outrage.
In response to the outcry, Bowser has said she will assign more police to find missing children, and establish a task force to determine what social services families might need. She said that she was hoping to make her city a national model, adding that until Dickerson started posting the reports on Twitter, “I didn’t recognize the substantial number that we get on a daily basis.’’
