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A Child is Missing training held
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The Cherokee County Sheriff's Office hosted a training
session by the Florida based organization "A Child is Missing" (ACIM) today.
The training was attended by over 40 law enforcement officers from agencies
across the upstate and midland South Carolina.
The Cherokee County Sheriff's Office has participated in the program for
over one year, and has successfully used the program in the past. The
program was held because a child goes missing every 40 seconds in the United
States. Your child has a 1 in 42 chance of going missing.
A Child Is Missing (ACIM) is a national non-profit organization offering
free assistance to law enforcement to aid in recovering missing persons
(including children, teens, and elderly). They provide immediate telephone
alerts to the surrounding community when an individual goes missing. To this
date, ACIM alerts have led to more than 285 recoveries.
Activated only by law enforcement, the ACIM program is available nationwide.
ACIM can place 1,000 calls in sixty seconds, can process multiple cases
simultaneously, and can work without jurisdictional boundaries.
ACIM also has a sexual predator / offender program, offered in states that
allow law enforcement to notify residents that a predator has moved into
their neighborhood.
ACIM plans to begin new notification programs such as:
Child Abduction Response Team (CART), Airport Alerts, School Lockdown, and
College / University Alerts.
THE ACIM PROGRAM WORKS LIKE THIS:
An officer has verified that an individual is missing and an ACIM technician
is called. The officer gives the technician the pertinent information about
the missing person, including description, clothes worn and time/location
last seen. The technician records a personalized message with case details
asking residents for information and to check their premises. Answering
machines can pick up ACIM calls so that residents can hear the alert when
returning home.
After recovery, the agency calls ACIM to stop the search. ACIM then faxes a
case follow-up form to the officer/agency to be filled out, documenting the
conclusion of the case.
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