Black kids go missing at a higher rate than white kids. Here’s why we don’t hear about them

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN

Updated 4:11 PM. November 3, 2019

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/03/us/missing-children-of-color-trnd/index.html#

(CNN) The chilling story of Jayme Closs, the 13-year-old Wisconsin girl who was kidnapped after her parents were killed last year, was national news.

But people might be less familiar with the story of Arianna Fitts, a 2-year-old who went missing in 2016 before her mother was found brutally murdered in the San Francisco Bay Area.Each of these cases is compelling, but the two didn’t receive the same amount of media attention.

Some experts believe it’s because Closs is white and Fitts is black.In fact, data shows that missing white children receive far more media coverage than missing black and brown children, despite higher rates of missing children among communities of color.

The FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database lists 424,066 missing children under 18 in 2018, the most recent year for which data is available. About 37 percent of those children are black, even though black children only make up about 14 percent of all children in the United States.