According to the National Crime Information Centers, missing an unidentified person statistics for 2014,

there are 84,924 active missing person cases in the US today.

If that number sounds small to you, as it did to me,

it turns out that being considered a true missing person

is a somewhat tricky status to attain.

These statistics maintained and updated by the FBI, are limited to people that local police are actively looking for, so the 85,000 number does not include many who would be considered missing by their families or community.

In addition, the database uses its own somewhat strict criteria for putting someone into

its system and then its own criteria for removing a case.

So it's hard to know if this number is close to being accurate or not even in the ballpark.

There's also a huge gap between this number and those who are reported missing. That number was over 600,000 in 2014.

Of these cases, again, according to the FBI, 75% either return home are found by police or their records are deemed invalid, whatever that means.

To further complicate matters, the true number of those who are missing does not, of course, include the unknown number of people who have gone

missing but were never reported in the first place which may include the

most vulnerable members of our society that is people who have no one to report them missing, leaving them exposed to the worst kinds of human rights abuses.

Considering all these things, that leaves the 85,000 cases that are said to be true and

official, but for our purposes, we can assume that the number is more rather than less.

Some of these are documented on a different online database called Namis, the National Missing

and Unidentified System.

This database allows members of the public and law enforcement a shared place to research

missing people, where the National Crime Information Center is a place for statistics.

Name us as a website that tries to put a face and a story to each missing person.

It's hard to describe the effect looking at these cases can have. They quickly feel personal and emotional, intimate even.

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