Child Protection

Monitoring Child Care Services

Of all the missing children reported to NCMEC between Oct. 1, 2017, and Sept. 30, 2019, 71% were reported missing while in the care of state agencies. Of the 94,906 reported incidents of children that went missing from care over seven years (2013-2019), 74% went missing from their foster home placement. Between 2017-2019, 16% of children reported missing from care were likely victims of sex-trafficking, 49% were at risk of alcohol/drug use, 16% likely had suicidal tendencies, and 11% were possibly involved with gangs.

How we can help: We can actively monitor the adults who come in contact with children in state care for potential threats, on a 24x7 basis. For instance, we can proactively inform a child case worker, through an end-to-end encrypted, and fully automated alert, if a foster parent, or a group home staffer, has been arrested for domestic violence or downloading child sexual abuse material (CSAM), within minutes of that arrest. That way, they could proactively go in and remove a child from harm's way, if necessary.

In 2020, NCMEC’s CyberTipline received more than 21.7 million reports, most related to:

• Apparent child sexual abuse material

• Online enticement, including "sextortion"

• Child sex trafficking

• Child sexual molestation

These included 65.4 million files with:

• 33,690,561 images

• 31,654,163 videos

• 120,590 other files

NCMEC responded to more than 17,000 reports regarding possible child sex trafficking last year. Source: NCMEC

Protecting Those With Special Needs

According to NCES data, in 2019–20, 7.3 million students between the ages of 3 and 21 received special education services — that was equal to about 14% of all public-school students in the U.S. According to the CDC, 10.8% of American adults have a cognition disability with serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions, while 6.8% have an independent living disability. A core belief for us is to help protect those who cannot protect themselves, cannot speak for themselves, or may not know they’re in danger.

How we can help: We can provide fully automated, continuous criminal background checks for individuals that interact with minors or at-risk adults. Our fully automated tools allow agencies and institutions to proactively monitor care providers, therapists, and educators in real-time. From a privacy standpoint, we do not monitor social media or look at credit reports, mobile phone records, license plates, or anything except real-time arrest and conviction data, for public safety purposes.

Investigative Tools
and Resources

We began building our searchable national criminal database after a chance conversation at the 2017 Missing & Unidentified Persons Conference (MUPC), when we were asked if there was a way to track a person last seen with a missing child and realized there was no real-time arrest data available. As most investigators know, unless it’s a familial abduction, it would be the rare trafficker or abductor who wakes up one day and abducts a child as a first offense. There’s typically a pattern of felonious activity in the leadup.

How we can help: We provide tools to identify, in real-time, an unknown face, or let you know through an automated monitoring tool, when a known or unknown subject on your watchlist is found in an LE system. It could change cold case investigations, missing person cases, and possibly, Victim ID. We can also programmatically give you granular, real-time stats; such as, how many were arrested in Q1 2021 for prostitution of a minor in Maricopa County?

Research, Education, and Training

As a diversity-focused organization at the juxtaposition of technology, big data, public safety, and the criminal justice system, we believe we have an obligation to ask questions of ourselves and others, research, educate, learn, and innovate, and help find data-driven technological solutions to real-world public safety problems. We publish research and easily digestible public safety-focused information at https://www.biometrica.com/public-safety/. We also provide free training and workshops for groups working on protecting children, at-risk adults, and individuals with special needs.

What are we doing? We provide resources to underserved communities looking for affordable, real-time solutions to community-specific public safety issues. We will soon offer a certification course to train law enforcement groups in how and when to use facial recognition and big data, the importance of pairing human intelligence and machine intelligence, and recognizing human bias in using tech and eliminating it.

Community-Building and Partnerships

We may be a tech & data company, but we firmly believe we are part of a much-larger community of people that care deeply about protecting the most at-risk groups amongst us. We work with child protection organizations, groups focused on tracking human and sex-traffickers, sex-offenders, and people that facilitate hosting CSAM on the dark web. We partner with law enforcement, state and federal agencies focused on protecting children that are missing and exploited, and tribal partners focused on finding Missing & Murdered Indigenous Persons.

Reach out, we're listening: If you’re in the business of protecting the vulnerable or finding the missing, feel free to contact us to find out if we can work together on making our communities stronger, and children and at-risk adults less vulnerable. Our software, data, and tools are best used by those that know when to utilize them, how to utilize them, and how best to use them in tandem with other systems and pointer data.