by Heather Worland
Photography by Kay Chernush

Each week, 57 million Mailbox Values cards hit American mail boxes bearing the photo of a missing child and the question “Have you seen me?”

Other tools for finding missing children include entering “GO MISSING” while cruising the Internet or working with an interactive kiosk in the Washington National Airport.

A U of L alumnus is responsible for these traditional and not so traditional approaches to recovering children. Some may know him as the past Alumni Association president who helped start the Golden Alumni Society and Outstanding Alumnus programs for the College of Arts and Sciences and for the School of Law. Others may know him as the former executive director of the Louisville Jefferson County Criminal Justice Commission, former director of the City of Louisville’s Department of Public Health and Safety, or the man honored by Louisville Magazine as one of the city’s trendsetters for 1983.

“Trendsetter” is the best word to describe Ernie Allen ’68A and the approaches he has brought to his work as president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

An emerging national crisis drew Allen to this work.

“It started in Louisville,” recalls Allen. “We had, in the late ’70s, in Louisville and Jefferson County, created a special unit targeting crimes against children and against those who preyed upon children and it became viewed as a national model.” Allen also credits two fellow alumni, John Rabun ’77G and U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell ’64A, with helping to start the center. As a direct result of this national attention, the unit was invited to consult the U.S. Department of Justice in the missing and murdered children cases in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981.

The Atlanta cases showed Allen that a national organization was needed to focus on crimes against children. The national conference that Allen hoped for never materialized, so “in 1981, we hosted our own in Louisville and it was an extraordinary experience” that attracted many victims’ parents, network television, law enforcement leaders, and political leaders such as former U.S. Senator Paul Simon of Illinois.

The conference accomplished many things, including the passing of the Missing Children’s Act in congress and the “creation of a national resource center to tie America together [and] to create a national response in cases of child victimization.” It also marked the transformation of the Louisville unit into the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Allen’s dream was close and in eight years he would be named the center’s president and CEO.

Since 1984, the center has handled approximately 1.1 million calls through its national hotline, 1-800-THE-LOST; trained more than 140,000 police and other professionals; and distributed nearly 15 million free, issue-based publications. The center has also worked with law enforcement on 56,142 missing child cases, resulting in the recovery of 37,526 children.

Under Allen’s leadership the organization has undertaken aggressive new steps to find missing children, including a close relationship with the computer industry.

“We’re linked to the on-line industry, so that average citizens on the Internet can access photos and information on missing kids as well as safety information.”

The center is the only nonprofit organization in America that can access the FBI’s national crime computer.

Allen notes that they are even using computers in cases of children missing for years. “We take a photograph of a child and use computer technology and age that photograph to what the child looks like today” (see sidebar).

Other partnerships with private corporations have led to new programs such as Polaroid’s “Kid Care.” The program involves police officers visiting schools to teach children how to react to unfamiliar situations and that the police are the “good guys.” Polaroid also provides photo IDs for each child in the program.

Polaroid isn’t the only corporation working with the center. Blockbuster Video recently joined with “Kid Print.” One month each year, Blockbuster provides free videotaping of children. These videos are helpful because they show both the child and the child’s mannerisms.

The partnerships, according to Allen, are one of the center’s strengths. They prove that public and private groups can work toward a common goal: recovering missing children and preventing abduction.

Under Allen’s leadership, the center receives between 200 and 300 leads from every Advo mailing, 600 computer leads every day, and 14,000 interactive kiosk searches at Washington National Airport. From those leads, one out of every seven children featured on an Advo card is recovered, 60 age progression cases have been solved, and the center’s recovery rate has increased from just over 60 percent when the center opened to 80 percent. Those numbers and percentages matter to Allen, but he says, the real rewards of his job come from seeing the recovered children reunited with their families.

Heather Worland ’96A is a former University Communications intern. She currently works in the U of L Alumni Office as a School of Law Coordinator.