NPD joins an automated program aimed at helping find missing persons

Minutes count when looking for missing persons. The longer it takes to find a missing person the greater the area they could be in and the difficulty increases exponentially with a larger area.

Nevada police have a new tool in their arsenal to reduce the time it takes to find a missing person, an automated phone system.

Sergeant Detective Casey Crain said a non-profit organization, A Child Is Missing Alert, will send automated telephone calls to residences and businesses within the area a missing person is located to inform the people that a missing person may be near.

"They can send out 1,000 calls a minute," Crain said. "It's just a short prerecorded message, 20 or 30 seconds long, that lets people know someone is missing and gives their description and asks anyone seeing the person to call the Nevada Police Department."

When the police receive a missing person report they call A Child Is Missing and give the location and the organization makes the phone calls.

"We tell them where the person is missing from and how long it has been and they calculate how far they could have gotten and their software tells them which phone numbers to call," Crain said. "They record a short message with the missing person's description and asks anyone seeing them to call the Nevada Police. All the calls are pre-recorded and they have their software make the calls."

"Getting the public involved increases the eyes and ears of the police," Public Safety Director Gary Herstein said. "This new system helps to get the word out quickly. Casey went to a seminar on it and is our point man for it."

Herstein said the department wanted to let residents know what to expect before a situation arose that required the use of the system.

"We want people to know what we're doing and why we're doing it, we don't want to confuse them," Herstein said.

Herstein also said the program would probably only be used occasionally.

"We'll probably use it four or five times a year," Herstein said. "We won't use it for every missing person, just for young children, people who might wander away from a nursing home or someone who might be in some sort of danger because of health problems."

The service has been in Florida since 1997 and is free to law enforcement agencies.

On the Web: http://www.achildismissing.org/.