John Briano
Former New York Police Department Detective
S: How was it like to find missing children around 1986 and the Etan and Adam cases?
JB: So, if somebody came up to us and said “my child is missing” or “my child is lost” or “my child ran away, he didn’t come home” or something along those lines, really the basic procedure back then was to take a report, get a description and a picture of the child, broadcast it across the police radio, and basically do just a little search: if they lived in a building, search the building, knock on the neighbors’ doors and things like that. But for the most part, that was pretty much the end of it. You and maybe a partner did it, or possibly two other police officers that may have, when we patrolled, we patrolled in what we called sectors, we patrolled a certain area that was our area, then maybe the sector next to you maybe come over and help you. But, that was basically it. And the truth is, if the family didn’t keep up on it, the investigation wouldn’t really go anywhere. It was a time where there weren’t a lot of police officers, and there was a lot of crime. So their concentration was more on violent crimes and things like that. What you always thought when you got a call and you went to the house was that they weren’t telling you the whole truth. You know, “Did he run away before?” “No”. Now they have all these databases, and that way you can tell right away how many times the kid ran away. But back then, we didn’t really have a database to know that within the New York City police department. So that was basically what we did: got a picture, took a report, did a little search, and that was basically it.
S: So you didn’t share information from state to state? There was nothing like that?
JB: Not really. I mean, we put it in maybe an intra-department database, but nothing along the lines of sharing it with the state next door or something like that. It probably would have been a good idea, but we didn’t.
S: And how prevalent were the missing children cases back then?
JB: It was a lot of them. I mean, were a good amount of them runaways, yes, they were. In New York City at the time, especially in the late 70s into the early 80s, there were a lot of kids who would run away from other states and come here and go to Times Square. There’s a place called Times Square where there was a lot of prostitution, you know, a lot of child prostitution, things like that. And they could be picked up by these men that, the name for them was chicken pox, because basically what they were doing, they were looking at young children who ran away. Because the buses, when you take a bus to New York City from a lot of places out of town, it goes into Times Square or Grand Central Station, so these people would go and prey on these children. So, there were a lot of missing children, but the children who were missing from out of town we didn’t have much information on them back then, in 1986. Now, the children that were missing in our own area that were reported by, let’s say, their guardians or their parents, there was a lot of it going on. But, I don’t think any less than there is today, to be honest with you. For the last time around when I was a detective, you still got a good amount of cases of kids running away or go missing.
S: Do you remember how the Milk Carton Campaign was back then?
JB: Well, I remember obviously as a police officer and detective, but I really remember the milk carton thing from when I was a kid. We had a child that when missing where I lived in, Staten Island, NY. Her name was Holy Ann Hughes, and they put her on the back of one of those milk cartons. Prior to this happening, I could go basically, even as a 9 year old, 10 year old, 11 year old, kinda go wherever I wanted in my neighborhood. And I grew up in an urban setting in an apartment building, so you could go outside, and I would be blocks away from my house, you know, going into these other apartment buildings, hanging out with my friends, playing sports or whatever. When Holy Ann Hughes happened, I had to be right in front of the building at all times, I couldn’t leave. So, that is my experience of remembering that with the milk cartons. I remember being on the milk cartons was always something like, the kid wasn’t in my neighborhood, so it really wasn’t a big deal. Then of a sudden this young girl was missing from my neighborhood and all of a sudden it was a big deal. So yes, I do remember that. But that was basically the way people would talk about those children, you wouldn’t really hear much about it in the news. You may hear a flash in the news, but there was so much crime in New York City back then that the homicides were the highest they’ve ever been, you know, violent crimes, so missing children, although it should have been really important, it kind of was not as important, because most were deemed runaways.
S: And do you think helped improve finding missing children at all?
JB: Well, I think that, even if it helped find one child, it helps. I think that anything that makes the public aware that there were missing children out there definitely helped. Did it help change policy of police departments…? I think what helped change the policy of police departments was probably the Etan Patz case. But it actually changed it very slowly. It didn’t really pick up pace. But, I think men like John Walsh, the guy who does America’s Most Wanted, people like that, really helped change the face of missing children. Now, not too long ago, what I really remember changed a lot of laws around NYC and New Jersey was the case of Megan Kanka, and also Amber Hagerman. But Megan Kanka was a young girl, I think she was 9 years old, who was abducted by her next door neighbor. The police did a search, they couldn’t find her, and it went on for days and weeks. How they found her was, there was an odor coming from her neighbor’s backyard, and they did an investigation and found out that the guy had abducted her. And that was the case where I remember that, all of a sudden, things changed. No longer was it just like the cops taking a report and doing a search. It was a full out, what we call, mobilization. And what that means in the NYPD is: when a child goes missing, you do a mobilization on every missing child, so, what that means is, the police officers go there, they take the report, the detective HAVE to respond for the local precinct, there’s nothing like we may or may not go, no, they HAVE to go. The local precinct also sends a Sargent, which is, you know, a boss, and a Captain from the area which, Captains don’t cover only certain precincts, they cover usually a lot of precincts, and they starts what it’s called a mobilization. They’ll bring dogs in to search. This happens on almost every single missing child. Unless the child is known to the precinct for being a frequent runaway, then they won’t search that much, but if the child just goes missing, they search all the surrounding area within a 5 to 6 block radius, which it was never done before. And the cases never closed, it’s always opened, and the detectives worked on it every single day. They also have units for that now; the Missing Persons Squad will handle that case. So, it wasn’t like that when I went on in 86. It dramatically changed.
S: Did kids go missing because they ran away the most, or because they were abducted by strangers, or by parents and relatives?
JB: Well, statistically, kids would go missing, for the most part, the higher is that they run away. But kids who are abducted are normally abducted by people who they know. It’s not usually a stranger abduction. It does happen, most of them are, but it’s almost the same thing as sex offender crimes. Children who are victims of sex crimes are normally victims of sex crimes by people who they know, a lot of times a neighbor or a family member. So, if you’re talking about the bulk of the cases, it’s probably more that they ran away. But the cases that get a lot of publicity and a lot of attention are the ones where the child is just missing. For obvious reasons, you know, they are from a family… Let’s backtrack for a second. A lot of kids that runaway run away for a reason. It’s not always ALWAYS the parents’ fault or the guardians’ fault, but a lot of times you find that it’s problems within the family. Either it’s a broken home, or drug problems, or mental abuse, physical abuse, that’s why kids run away. It’s not that the kid just decides “I don’t wanna be here anymore”. Do some of them, yeah. But the kids that get real publicity are the gets that are from that family where, you know, the mother may leave the kid in the car seat and then, all of a sudden, the kid is gone. Something like that has to be taken very seriously, obviously. You know, if the kid’s in the car seat, he can’t get up and walk away. So, they’re the bigger publicity cases, they get the most attention, especially if the people are socially economically up there in status, but I’d say more kids run away, or go missing, from families where there’s problems than just random families.
S: What would be a key factor in why the Etan Patz and Adam Walsh cases got known?
JB: Bottom line, I believe, especially within the era, the parents didn’t give up. Not one time did they ever give up. A lot of people kinda let the police department do their work and kinda just leave it up to them. Bottom line, these people who didn’t, they were out there, actively looking, you know, for their sons and they did not let it rest until something happened. John Walsh took to the extreme of creating a show and everything, and there was a lot of legislature that has been made and laws passed because of him. So, I think that probably was the biggest factor. Unfortunately, the local police departments could only do so much, and they’ll search for a while, but then after that it’s kind of like, you know, where’s the kid? They’ll maybe assign it to the Missing Persons Squad, but unfortunately, there are thousands of children missing, so, you have detectives that will have hundreds of cases. I mean, you only have so many hours in a day, you know. So the families of those two kids really pushed the issue and made it known about the problem with missing children. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of kids that go missing that are victims of crimes. Sex offenders, pornography… All kinds of things that normal people don’t know about. This is a whole industry of human trafficking, and there’s a lot of people who organize crimes that are written and stuff, and a lot of those children go missing in these situations. A good amount. A lot of runaways, don’t get me wrong, you know, because it’s always like you don’t want to talk about the runaways, but a lot of kids do run away. Either they’re unhappy, or they have mental problems… A lot of kids that run away feel like it’s better where they run away and it’s not, for the most part.
S: How would you say that those cases and the Milk Carton Campaign were a turning point to finding missing children? How did it change from 1986 to now?
JB: I think that, because of people like John Walsh and Etan Patz’s parents, they pressured a lot of Congress men and women to change a lot of laws. And with the change of laws, that means, when you change laws, the people in charge of enforcing those laws are the police departments. So when you change policy and law, these police departments gotta comply with those regulations, otherwise they’ll be on the scrutiny, especially the higher ones and the bosses. So, I think those cases changes laws, changed regulations. And when they change regulations, this means that the police departments had to comply and do different things to comply with these laws. You know, searches, cases, bringing dogs in… Whatever they had to do to look for that child. But bottom line: laws and people like John Walsh getting these laws passed changed a lot of things. The AMBER Alerts, you never had anything like that when I first started in a police department. Now, if a child is missing, if it falls into a certain criteria, age, and depending on the case, it’s an automatic AMBER Alert, and you gotta broadcast that across. You see, when you’re driving on the highway, you see that now. You didn’t see that back in 1986. Simple answer was that laws changed.
JB: So, if somebody came up to us and said “my child is missing” or “my child is lost” or “my child ran away, he didn’t come home” or something along those lines, really the basic procedure back then was to take a report, get a description and a picture of the child, broadcast it across the police radio, and basically do just a little search: if they lived in a building, search the building, knock on the neighbors’ doors and things like that. But for the most part, that was pretty much the end of it. You and maybe a partner did it, or possibly two other police officers that may have, when we patrolled, we patrolled in what we called sectors, we patrolled a certain area that was our area, then maybe the sector next to you maybe come over and help you. But, that was basically it. And the truth is, if the family didn’t keep up on it, the investigation wouldn’t really go anywhere. It was a time where there weren’t a lot of police officers, and there was a lot of crime. So their concentration was more on violent crimes and things like that. What you always thought when you got a call and you went to the house was that they weren’t telling you the whole truth. You know, “Did he run away before?” “No”. Now they have all these databases, and that way you can tell right away how many times the kid ran away. But back then, we didn’t really have a database to know that within the New York City police department. So that was basically what we did: got a picture, took a report, did a little search, and that was basically it.
S: So you didn’t share information from state to state? There was nothing like that?
JB: Not really. I mean, we put it in maybe an intra-department database, but nothing along the lines of sharing it with the state next door or something like that. It probably would have been a good idea, but we didn’t.
S: And how prevalent were the missing children cases back then?
JB: It was a lot of them. I mean, were a good amount of them runaways, yes, they were. In New York City at the time, especially in the late 70s into the early 80s, there were a lot of kids who would run away from other states and come here and go to Times Square. There’s a place called Times Square where there was a lot of prostitution, you know, a lot of child prostitution, things like that. And they could be picked up by these men that, the name for them was chicken pox, because basically what they were doing, they were looking at young children who ran away. Because the buses, when you take a bus to New York City from a lot of places out of town, it goes into Times Square or Grand Central Station, so these people would go and prey on these children. So, there were a lot of missing children, but the children who were missing from out of town we didn’t have much information on them back then, in 1986. Now, the children that were missing in our own area that were reported by, let’s say, their guardians or their parents, there was a lot of it going on. But, I don’t think any less than there is today, to be honest with you. For the last time around when I was a detective, you still got a good amount of cases of kids running away or go missing.
S: Do you remember how the Milk Carton Campaign was back then?
JB: Well, I remember obviously as a police officer and detective, but I really remember the milk carton thing from when I was a kid. We had a child that when missing where I lived in, Staten Island, NY. Her name was Holy Ann Hughes, and they put her on the back of one of those milk cartons. Prior to this happening, I could go basically, even as a 9 year old, 10 year old, 11 year old, kinda go wherever I wanted in my neighborhood. And I grew up in an urban setting in an apartment building, so you could go outside, and I would be blocks away from my house, you know, going into these other apartment buildings, hanging out with my friends, playing sports or whatever. When Holy Ann Hughes happened, I had to be right in front of the building at all times, I couldn’t leave. So, that is my experience of remembering that with the milk cartons. I remember being on the milk cartons was always something like, the kid wasn’t in my neighborhood, so it really wasn’t a big deal. Then of a sudden this young girl was missing from my neighborhood and all of a sudden it was a big deal. So yes, I do remember that. But that was basically the way people would talk about those children, you wouldn’t really hear much about it in the news. You may hear a flash in the news, but there was so much crime in New York City back then that the homicides were the highest they’ve ever been, you know, violent crimes, so missing children, although it should have been really important, it kind of was not as important, because most were deemed runaways.
S: And do you think helped improve finding missing children at all?
JB: Well, I think that, even if it helped find one child, it helps. I think that anything that makes the public aware that there were missing children out there definitely helped. Did it help change policy of police departments…? I think what helped change the policy of police departments was probably the Etan Patz case. But it actually changed it very slowly. It didn’t really pick up pace. But, I think men like John Walsh, the guy who does America’s Most Wanted, people like that, really helped change the face of missing children. Now, not too long ago, what I really remember changed a lot of laws around NYC and New Jersey was the case of Megan Kanka, and also Amber Hagerman. But Megan Kanka was a young girl, I think she was 9 years old, who was abducted by her next door neighbor. The police did a search, they couldn’t find her, and it went on for days and weeks. How they found her was, there was an odor coming from her neighbor’s backyard, and they did an investigation and found out that the guy had abducted her. And that was the case where I remember that, all of a sudden, things changed. No longer was it just like the cops taking a report and doing a search. It was a full out, what we call, mobilization. And what that means in the NYPD is: when a child goes missing, you do a mobilization on every missing child, so, what that means is, the police officers go there, they take the report, the detective HAVE to respond for the local precinct, there’s nothing like we may or may not go, no, they HAVE to go. The local precinct also sends a Sargent, which is, you know, a boss, and a Captain from the area which, Captains don’t cover only certain precincts, they cover usually a lot of precincts, and they starts what it’s called a mobilization. They’ll bring dogs in to search. This happens on almost every single missing child. Unless the child is known to the precinct for being a frequent runaway, then they won’t search that much, but if the child just goes missing, they search all the surrounding area within a 5 to 6 block radius, which it was never done before. And the cases never closed, it’s always opened, and the detectives worked on it every single day. They also have units for that now; the Missing Persons Squad will handle that case. So, it wasn’t like that when I went on in 86. It dramatically changed.
S: Did kids go missing because they ran away the most, or because they were abducted by strangers, or by parents and relatives?
JB: Well, statistically, kids would go missing, for the most part, the higher is that they run away. But kids who are abducted are normally abducted by people who they know. It’s not usually a stranger abduction. It does happen, most of them are, but it’s almost the same thing as sex offender crimes. Children who are victims of sex crimes are normally victims of sex crimes by people who they know, a lot of times a neighbor or a family member. So, if you’re talking about the bulk of the cases, it’s probably more that they ran away. But the cases that get a lot of publicity and a lot of attention are the ones where the child is just missing. For obvious reasons, you know, they are from a family… Let’s backtrack for a second. A lot of kids that runaway run away for a reason. It’s not always ALWAYS the parents’ fault or the guardians’ fault, but a lot of times you find that it’s problems within the family. Either it’s a broken home, or drug problems, or mental abuse, physical abuse, that’s why kids run away. It’s not that the kid just decides “I don’t wanna be here anymore”. Do some of them, yeah. But the kids that get real publicity are the gets that are from that family where, you know, the mother may leave the kid in the car seat and then, all of a sudden, the kid is gone. Something like that has to be taken very seriously, obviously. You know, if the kid’s in the car seat, he can’t get up and walk away. So, they’re the bigger publicity cases, they get the most attention, especially if the people are socially economically up there in status, but I’d say more kids run away, or go missing, from families where there’s problems than just random families.
S: What would be a key factor in why the Etan Patz and Adam Walsh cases got known?
JB: Bottom line, I believe, especially within the era, the parents didn’t give up. Not one time did they ever give up. A lot of people kinda let the police department do their work and kinda just leave it up to them. Bottom line, these people who didn’t, they were out there, actively looking, you know, for their sons and they did not let it rest until something happened. John Walsh took to the extreme of creating a show and everything, and there was a lot of legislature that has been made and laws passed because of him. So, I think that probably was the biggest factor. Unfortunately, the local police departments could only do so much, and they’ll search for a while, but then after that it’s kind of like, you know, where’s the kid? They’ll maybe assign it to the Missing Persons Squad, but unfortunately, there are thousands of children missing, so, you have detectives that will have hundreds of cases. I mean, you only have so many hours in a day, you know. So the families of those two kids really pushed the issue and made it known about the problem with missing children. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of kids that go missing that are victims of crimes. Sex offenders, pornography… All kinds of things that normal people don’t know about. This is a whole industry of human trafficking, and there’s a lot of people who organize crimes that are written and stuff, and a lot of those children go missing in these situations. A good amount. A lot of runaways, don’t get me wrong, you know, because it’s always like you don’t want to talk about the runaways, but a lot of kids do run away. Either they’re unhappy, or they have mental problems… A lot of kids that run away feel like it’s better where they run away and it’s not, for the most part.
S: How would you say that those cases and the Milk Carton Campaign were a turning point to finding missing children? How did it change from 1986 to now?
JB: I think that, because of people like John Walsh and Etan Patz’s parents, they pressured a lot of Congress men and women to change a lot of laws. And with the change of laws, that means, when you change laws, the people in charge of enforcing those laws are the police departments. So when you change policy and law, these police departments gotta comply with those regulations, otherwise they’ll be on the scrutiny, especially the higher ones and the bosses. So, I think those cases changes laws, changed regulations. And when they change regulations, this means that the police departments had to comply and do different things to comply with these laws. You know, searches, cases, bringing dogs in… Whatever they had to do to look for that child. But bottom line: laws and people like John Walsh getting these laws passed changed a lot of things. The AMBER Alerts, you never had anything like that when I first started in a police department. Now, if a child is missing, if it falls into a certain criteria, age, and depending on the case, it’s an automatic AMBER Alert, and you gotta broadcast that across. You see, when you’re driving on the highway, you see that now. You didn’t see that back in 1986. Simple answer was that laws changed.