Panic in the Streets!

A few years ago I served on a panel of judges reviewing essays written by 8th graders. The subject was school bus safety. More than one of these young media consumers was willing to exclaim that MILLIONS of children are injured every year in bus accidents! Hyperboles of disaster attempt to boggle our senses every day and we indulge it like chocolate. Our sense of shared stress goes beyond the shared national grief of the September 11th terrorist attacks; we look around nervously at shopping malls since Omaha, and wince at the latest school violence news story. A good friend of mine proudly shared that he had taught his children to run and scream any time they were approached by a stranger. I couldn’t help but imagine the poor kid’s first job interview.

Are your children safe? Perspective is often a matter of mathematics. Let’s take school bus safety for example. The headlines flashed “17,000 School Bus Injuries Yearly: Number of Kids Hurt 3 Times Higher Than Previously Thought” (http://www.webmd.com/news/20061106/school-bus-injuries). After sucking frightened parents into reading the article, the writer goes on to cite that 97% of the youngsters sent to the ER were treated and released. Let’s face it, in today’s lawyered-up world, what decision maker would look at a busload of kids involved in a fender bender and not send everybody to the ER for a check? Even given that some of those 97% were scary hurts and cuts let’s look at raw numbers provided in that same article. The 17,000 students sent to ERs represent a tiny fraction of the 23,500,000 kids transported 4,300,000,000 miles every year. A truer headline would be “School Bus Transportation Amazingly Safe!”

I was a police chief in Colorado many miles away from Boulder when the 1996 JonBenet Ramsey murder mystery invaded the holidays. The six year old’s death in her comfortable home created another wave of our shared American anxiety. The first of many calls to my office was from a parent I knew who asked how she could protect her child from being snatched away. My first question to her was whether she always kept her children in seat belts and child restraints when in the car. Her answer was a timid and quizzical “Well… no.” I explained that the two highest injury causes to children were child abuse and car crashes (http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/children.htm). Child abductions do occur, but at a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of public perception. Child abuse is almost always perpetrated by those entrusted with the child, not by strangers.

Based on the scary stories you hear about kidnappings, what would be your guess as the total number of children murdered every year in stranger abductions? According to a 2002 U.S. Department of Justice report cited by the highly regarded National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/Statistics.pdf) nearly 800,000 reports of missing children were filed in the year studied. A distillation of these events shows that 115 children were victims of stereotypical kidnapping. While I would not minimize the hazards of familial abductions, custody disputes, or the angst generated by a teenager staying with a friend without permission – all of which comprise the vast majority of missing children reports - finding that two of these grisly events occur every week is a much different perspective than believing that thousands occur every day.

At heart, I am a cop. That means I know that tragedy is always lurking a heartbeat away for any of us. But the reality – the hard, statistical reality – is that your child can be raised with some common sense care and supervision and very likely live through the day. Relax.