How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) with the TicTocTrack Watch

Re:How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) with the... by zestyping on Thursday April 18, 2019 @01:42PM (#19693051)

I'm trying to understand how you got 200 from this report. On page 2, I see this paragraph about the Missing Person Circumstances (MPC) field in their database:

"Of the 647,435 records entered in 2016, the MPC field was utilized in 315,995 (48.8%). When the MPC field was utilized in 2016 entries, 303,237 (96%) were coded as Runaway, 2,107 (.7%) as Abducted by Non-custodial Parent, 303 (.1%) as Abducted by Stranger, and 10,348 (3.3%) as Adult - Federally required entry."

So it looks like one should take the number 303 for "Abducted by Stranger" and perhaps, since only 48.8% of records had this field populated, extrapolate to about 620 cases. Does that sound right, or should it be 200 based on a different reasoning?

Of course, 620 cases is still a pretty small number. I just wanted to understand where your numbers came from. How did you get the figure of 90% making it home safely, and how did you calculate the probability of 0.00027%?

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Re:How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) with the... by Sir_Cmpwn on Thursday April 18, 2019 @01:49PM (#19693106)

Actually I have to admit that I originally wrote my numbers based on a random article I found which summarizes this source:

https://www.creditdonkey.com/kidnapping-statistics.html

Then I went to the source to verify that the information was there, but didn't re-run my numbers. I apologise, that was lazy and misleading.

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Re:How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) with the... by zestyping on Saturday April 20, 2019 @02:15AM (#19705075)

Oh, okay, cool. Thanks for clearing that up! I just happened to dive in because I also believe the panic about abductions by strangers is overblown, and wanted to be able to quote numbers with confidence.

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