Special Teams Practice Searching For Missing Children
SOUTHLAKE (CBSDFW.COM) - Anyone walking into the Southlake Department of Public Safety office Thursday could feel the sense of urgency in the air. An emergency operations center, or EOC, was filled with officers talking urgently in small groups.
"We have three seperate locations for latitude / longitude," a radio crackled as an officer began writing down information from the radio traffic.
Officers from a dozen North Texas police departments were simulating a search for a missing child.
"Do we already have the tip line set up?" one detective asked a public information officer.
The training exercise was for the Northeast Tarrant and Denton County Child Abduction Response team, or CART.
The organization is one of only two certified CARTs in Texas and a handful in the U.S. It pools resources from different agencies to find missing children quickly. It even has a standby list of citizen volunteers who are ready to help.
By early afternoon, the drill had moved to a Southlake park where a physical search for the "missing child" begins.
"One agency can't do the work; (it) doesn't have the manpower to do a wide search, especially of a park like this," said Kim Leach, spokeswoman for the Southlake DPS. "With CART you have 12 agencies that jump into action. You have the EOC, people taking information, people out here in the field."
CART members' officers and public volunteers undergo special training for the mission. They learn that after six hours, the chance of finding a child alive drops dramatically. They say an Amber Alerts is a useful tool, but they don't wait for an alert to go into action.
"We will respond to things even that may not have reached an Amber Alert level," said Lt. Kirk Roberts, one of CART's coordinators. "We're not going to wait that long. As soon as we think something has occured we've got some criteria built in within each agency that notify the CART, myself or another commander."
Today's exercise ended with the discovery of two simulated graves. A grim reminder for the participants that every minute could be a life saved or lost in a child abduction.
