BALTIMORE, Md. — Baltimore City Council members left a Tuesday hearing unconvinced that the police department can say how many people are missing in the city. The Baltimore Police Department gave the Public Safety Committee two sets of numbers that did not match, and council members said the department had no clear process for tracking such cases.
The hearing was an informational session on missing-person policies and procedures. Invited to brief the panel were the police department, prosecutors from the State’s Attorney’s Office for Baltimore City and its juvenile unit, state juvenile-services and human-services officials, and the group Black and Missing. It also asked for five years of data on incidents, staffing and turnover at the department’s Missing Persons Unit and its district offices.
One data set came from the unit and another from police districts, and they used different age brackets and counting methods. The unit’s figures showed all 484 cases it received were cleared, yet no district reported anything close to a full clearance rate. Several districts were below 80 percent in 2026, and one was as low as 12 percent in 2022. Police said a district can close a case without telling the unit, and the reverse can also happen.
Most reports involve children and teens between 10 and 19, and the unit counted 412 reports for ages 10 to 13 in 2026. Col. John Herzog attributed much of that to runaways from group homes and young people who skip school or miss curfew. Councilman Mark Conway, who chairs the committee, and Councilwoman Phylicia Porter said the numbers did not show why people go missing. Councilman Paris Gray objected to the department’s use of the word runaway, a term missing-children advocates reject.
Councilwoman Odette Ramos asked about the Southeast District, where 36 of 104 cases so far this year involved Hispanic people, up from 17 in 2025. A local advocate for missing and trafficked people told the panel the department’s answers left gaps that families fall through.