Press & News

CDs to help ID missing kids

JUSTIN JUOZAPAVICIUS World Staff Writer
05/31/2003
Tulsa World (Final Home Edition), Page A24 of News
A local insurance company is offering 40,000 discs for free.
It's only one CD, but one day it could become a component in the world's largest electronic dragnet for recovering missing children.

An insurance company announced Friday that it is armed with 40,000 discs to distribute to concerned parents free of charge.

Farmers Insurance Group has teamed with the national child identification program MILK -- Managing Information on Lost Kids -- to help recover missing children by distributing the discs.

"On behalf of the children of Tulsa and Oklahoma, I thank you," Mayor Bill LaFortune said at the news conference. "There can't be anything more important than making sure our children are safe and secure."

The MILK Digital ID disc was developed by Tulsa-based Imagery Concepts at the re quest of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

More than 2,000 children are reported missing every day, according to the center.

When a child is lost, 40 percent of parents are unable to produce a current photo of the child, and 34 percent don't know their child's height, weight and eye color, the center reports.

Now, parents and caregivers can use the disc to download recent photos and write descriptions of their children, creating a "digital memory album" that will be stored on a computer hard drive in case of emergency, said Tom Quinn, president of Imagery Concepts.

Every six months, the software will remind parents to store a new photo.

Should a child become lost or missing, the Digital ID can be sent via e-mail to law enforcement agencies and immediately forwarded to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

This is the first step toward a statewide Amber Alert plan, officials said.

"It was great to be in Oklahoma City this morning talking about how Tulsa started this trend," Quinn said.

The concept began here a year ago, when the Tulsa World began publishing a weekly insert containing color photos of missing children.

"No matter where I am in the U.S., people look at what the Tulsa World has done to help find these kids," Quinn said. "It's a powerful thing to get those pictures out to the public."

Because of the weekly inserts, 28 missing children have been returned home.

The World's inserts also inspired other newspapers, such as The Daily Oklahoman, to print the same sheet of photos, said Stacey Roggendorff, Tulsa World community relations manager.

"The Lorton family was the first to do this because they are committed to the people of this city," she said. "We've always been trendsetters," she said of the Tulsa World, "so why not this?"