Kansas City police promised new steps in missing persons. Why hasn’t it happened yet?

On April 11, Maj. Leslie Foreman of the Kansas City Police Department laid out a set of new steps to be taken by the agency’s recently revived missing person’s unit.

Those steps were to include using a national missing persons database that is open to the public, maintaining the department’s own public list of active cases and releasing reports on which cases are being closed or remain unsolved.

All were efforts and best practices that advocates and experts had been calling for as the department came under increasing criticism for appearing to pay too little attention to missing persons cases, especially those of Black people.

But nearly two weeks after Foreman described the new steps to be taken, department officials had not begun to put them consistently into practice and said they had no estimate of when they would begin. A department spokesman said Friday no new policies have been created.

“There has been NO change to policy or criteria with the reforming of this unit,” Sgt. Jacob Becchina wrote in an email to The Star in response to questions about the new efforts described by Foreman.

Becchina wrote that, despite Foreman’s statements, the relaunch of the unit did not come with any department policy changes for handling missing persons cases.

The squad is using department policies for missing adults and juveniles that have been in place since December 2021.

Becchina added on Monday that the department is working on implementing the new objectives for the missing persons unit.

“We are working with our web provider and the new missing persons staff to optimize our web capabilities for information sharing,” he said. “We don’t have an estimated time for that to be complete.”

That means that for now, the department’s policies and practices in handling missing persons cases have not changed.

“What [Foreman] talked about being new was all in the context of the unit being formed to focus their efforts on all missing persons under one umbrella, whereas prior the investigators that handled missing persons had additional duties split up,” Becchina wrote.

Foreman said on April 11 she was uncertain when all of the changes and new policies would be implemented but asked the public to be patient with the reactivated unit.

She was not available Monday to comment about when changes in department practice or policy would be made.

New steps not seen

In the April 11 news conference, Foreman said the revived unit would enter missing persons into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, a publicly accessible database when the cases dictates it as an investigative tool. It would not be used in every missing persons case.

Advocates have called for police to enter missing persons into the database right away, but have said police do not always do so.

In one recent example, 24-year-old Del Fig was reported missing in Kansas City April 8, but police did not create a listing for Fig’s case in the NamUS database for 12 days. They made the entry in the database April 20, the same day a Star reporter contacted police with questions about the case.

The second step step announced by Foreman was that the unit would maintain a list of active cases that would be accessible to the public.

The police department has long maintained a web page that features missing persons cases. But it is not updated with all recent cases.

The Fig case, for example, was not listed on the page Monday.

In a third step, Foreman said the police department’s public tracking system for missing persons cases would be posted on the department’s website and accessible to the public upon request, much like the daily homicide analysis the police department already makes available.

That information would, Foreman said, track the demographics of missing persons, information advocates said would help show if police were treating cases of missing Black people appropriately.

Following the April 11 announcement, the police department distributed an example of the report that it said would be available online.

But as of Monday, no such reports were posted on the department’s website.

KCPD daily missing persons report by Ian Cummings on Scribd

The department said it has plans to update its website to include a public tracking system for public missing persons. Officials did not have a timeline for when that would be done.

The revived unit is supposed to be staffed with seven detectives and one sergeant supervisor who are also expected to handle non-criminal death investigations such as suicides and drug overdoses. Police Chief Stacey Graves announced the reforming of the unit at a meeting of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners in late March.

The staffing changes were to go into effect April 16. Foreman has said the unit would be staffed on weekends.

Del Fig still missing

Roommates concerned about Fig’s safety reported them missing April 8, saying they had not been seen in nearly a week.

Police have said officers took that initial report. But Fig’s friend Greta Webb told The Star Fig’s roommates and grandmother had to return to the station multiple times before their information was accepted.

“I’ve been ripping my hair out worried about this,” Webb told The Star Thursday. “Nobody took this seriously in the first week, especially not police.”

On Thursday, the police department issued its first notice to the public about Fig’s case after The Star started asking questions.

That news release initially contained incorrect pronouns for Fig, who identifies as nonbinary, and a name one friend said Fig has not used in over five years.

Fig’s information is available in the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s missing persons database, although their gender is listed incorrectly as “female.” This listing indicates that the KCPD has entered their information into the National Crime Information Center system (NCIC) as required by Missouri law, but it is not known when the listing was created.

Friends learned on April 18 that Fig’s truck had been found abandoned on the side of Interstate 70 about 20 miles from Salina, Utah. Desperate for information, they created their own missing person posters for Fig and began sharing them on social media.

It was two days later that Kansas City police first created a listing for Fig’s case in the NamUS database.

After seeing the KCPD’s public post about the case, an acquaintance in Las Vegas — about 300 miles southwest of where Fig’s truck was reportedly found — reached out to Fig’s roommates via social media.

Fig had been staying with them, they said, but had left town on a Greyhound bus on April 18. The acquaintance didn’t know where Fig was heading.

“This person hadn’t seen that Fig was missing until Fig had already left Las Vegas,” roommate Michael McConnell told The Star.

He thinks that for most of the two weeks between abandoning their truck in Utah and getting on the Greyhound, Fig must have been staying in Las Vegas with this acquaintance.

But by the time police asked for the public’s help, Fig had already moved on.

Do you have information about Del Fig or other people missing from Kansas City? Has the KCPD been mishandling their search for a missing loved one? Let the authors of this story know by emailing grice@kcstar.com and nwallington@kcstar.com.

You can also submit a tip to the newsroom here.