Tim Williams, center, manager of the New York State Missing Persons Clearinghouse (NYSMP) checks progress with David Fallon, retired FBI investigator and NCJTC-AATTAP Associate.

: Intelligence Analyst Joy Johnston of the New York State Police answers questions during a rescue operation to locate children reported missing as runaways.

Samuel Lizzio and Mark Baney, New York State Police senior investigators, work a case. In 2024, New York closed 12,310 cases involving children reported missing as runaways, according to the Division of Criminal Justice Services.

Alan Lapage, NYSMPC investigative supervisor, rings a bell to signal a missing child was safely located.

By Jody Garlock

It’s an early morning in March, and about 100 law enforcement officials, social services professionals, legal experts, and others are gathered in a hotel ballroom in Latham, New York. Wearing lanyards with name tags and sitting at tables with laptops and papers in front of them, they seem poised for a routine conference. But there’s a seriousness in the air and laser focus as they work on their computers or huddle into small groups.

Eventually, the ringing of a bell sounds across the room. Heads turn toward a man holding a brass school bellas the realization sets in: A missing child has been located.

By the end of the three-day Capital Region Missing Child Rescue Operation, that bell will have been rung an impressive 63 times. Simultaneously, a computer screen projected onto a wall showed the number in big, bold lettering. Both served as uplifting motivators for the agencies and experts who united for a goal of finding missing children at risk of endangerment, exploitation, or harm. “After the first or second bell ring, everyone gets it—it’s powerful,” says Tim Williams, manager of the New York State Missing Persons Clearinghouse (NYSMPC), one of organizers. “You could feel the energy in the room continue to increase.”

More than 60 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, nonprofit organizations, and private partners came together to explore new leads, review case notes, and leverage technology to find at-risk youth reported missing as runaways.

The 63 children and teens located during the first-ever rescue operation for the Albany, Schenectady, and Troy areas ranged in age from 2 to 17 years old when they were reported

missing, and from 6 to 22 when found, according to the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS). And the overall number of those safely located continued to climb, as work that was started wrapped up after the event. Williams says 71 missing children have now been located as a direct result of the rescue operation.

“These are emotional events,” says Kevin Branzetti (shown below right under quote), CEO of the National Child Protection Task Force (NCPTF), which partnered with NYSMPC on the operation and has similar recovery missions scheduled in other states.

“We know these cases can be emotional roller coasters. You see a lot of tears.”

To drive home the importance of such ventures, Branzetti and Williams point to statistics. At the end of 2024, New York had slightly more than 1,000 active missing children cases. The majority of the 12,000-plus cases annually—95 percent— are reported as runaways.

“Every missing child is an endangered missing child,” Williams says. “Our focus was the runaway population because it’s often overlooked.”

Strategic Teamwork

The Capital Region event grew out of training sessions between NYSMPC and the Arkansas-based NCPTF. “We started to think ‘Could we put all these people in the same room with the sole mission of finding kids and closing cases?’ “ Williams says.

In October 2024, NYSMPC and NCPTF spearheaded their first joint rescue operation. That venture in the Buffalo area safely located 47 children reported missing as runways. Branzetti and Clearinghouse staffers, including Williams and Cindy Neff, who recently retired as NYSMPC manager, applied lessons they learned from the Buffalo operation. Comparatively, the Capital Region operation was more complex, involving coordination among three police departments, three district attorney’s offices, and three county social services agencies, along with many other entities.

“One of the most critical components is securing full buy-in from local partners, law enforcement, social services, district attorneys, and child advocacy centers,” Neff says. “Their collaboration is essential because these operations go beyond just locating missing youth. It’s also about understanding the underlying reasons they went missing and identifying the support needed to help prevent it from happening again.” (For more on Neff see the sidebar that follows this feature.)

The Capital Region operation required months of planning and meetings to review cases with agencies and coordinate logistics. Participants were ultimately organized into four teams— two for Albany and one each for Schenectady and Troy. A pre-operation meeting was held for all the teams prior to the operation.

Each team had a similar composition: a Clearinghouse representative who acted as the organizer, a crime analyst who had access to local police records, at least one detective from the agency working the case, representatives from NCTPF and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a probation official, someone from social services, and various other law enforcement officials. The goal was to ensure that each team had a variety of resources and skill sets, be it public records searching, tracking a cell phone, understanding social media work, or open-source intelligence. “No two police departments have the same sets of tools,” Branzetti says. “Everyone brings their tools to the game, and we get to share them.”

Adding a social services component—and having those professionals in the room prepared to go out when a child was recovered—was one of the lessons learned from the prior operation. Branzetti, Williams, and Neff note that the goal wasn’t just to find the child, but also to try to ensure the child doesn’t go missing again. “What we promote deeply is ‘Find. Listen. Help,’ “ Branzetti says. “It takes more than police to do that. It’s a society problem.”

The state’s Office of Children and Family Services coordinated with nonprofit organizations and victim assistance programs to assist the investigations and provide services and support for recovered children. “There was a whole support-service side of this ready to go and available—and put into action many times,” Williams says. If a child already had an assigned case worker, that person was notified.

A unique component was providing gift cards to ensure a child or teen had essentials, such as food, clothing, or haircare services. In some cases, the gift cards became an outreach opportunity for the social services worker to schedule a follow-up to take a teen shopping. “We wanted her to see that something is different today,” says Branzetti, whose organization secured donations to provide the gift cards. “We wanted her to understand that this isn’t the same old story. It’s about changing the trajectory.”

Additionally, the rescue operation also helps destigmatize the word “runaway.” “It’s a matter of changing the mindset of what that means,” Williams says.

“Everyone in the room is getting a better sense of the word as they work on the cases and realize that we can’t treat a runaway as ‘I’ll get to it when I get to it’ and instead say ‘Let’s make sure we’re doing something.’ “

‘Remarkable’ Collaboration

Heading into the rescue operation, the organizers didn’t have a set goal for the number of children they wanted to find. “If we can find even one missing child, that’s a positive,” Williams says. Because team members had started pre-work, some of the cases were able to be swiftly closed. A side benefit, Branzetti says, is that the rescue operation helps broaden or hone skills, and participants leave with added knowledge they can apply to their own cases. “These rescue operations turn into partial training events,” he says. “You actually may be writing a first search warrant or doing a first cell tower dump, or someone is walking you through how to track an IP address. You can’t beat that.”

The organizers also note that it’s heartening to see the camaraderie develop on the mixed teams, where members typically start out the rescue operation as strangers.

Williams says the operation proved to him how beneficial it is to bring together diverse groups. “We all tend to fall into the silo that we’re comfortable in, but we hear so many times, ‘Oh I wish I had reached out to you sooner,’ ” he says. “Sitting down at the same table, talking through cases, and sharing resources that are available is so important. Don’t be afraid to have those difficult conversations or continue to talk weekly or monthly to stay on top of things.”

For Neff, the rescue operation was a gratifying culmination to her long career. “When professionals from different agencies are brought together in the same room with a shared mission,” she says, “remarkable things can happen.”

For Cindy Neff, the Capital Region Missing Child Rescue Operation was a fitting end to a long career of helping children. In April, Neff retired from the New York State Missing Persons Clearinghouse, where she worked for 20 years—the past 11 years as manager. “She’s a force of nature,” says Kevin Branzetti, CEO of the National Child Protection Task Force who worked with Neff on the New York rescue operations and various other initiatives.

Over the years, Neff has been a familiar face at national AMBER Alert symposiums, serving as an Associate for NCJTC-AATTAP. She also led the charge for establishing the New York State Cold Case Review Panel and developing the Find Them web application to support law enforcement working missing persons cases.

The issue of children with multiple missing episodes has always been close to her heart. In New York, about half of the missing children classified as runaways involve repeat episodes. Neff likens it to her personal experience of her mother being shuffled from one nursing home to another until she landed in a place where she was treated with compassion and dignity. Like with her mother, she feels runaway children are placed wherever there is an open bed, not necessarily where they will receive the care and services they need.

To address the issue, she helped form a statewide partnership that promotes a systems-based approach to supporting vulnerable children. This led to launching RIPSTOP (Runaway Intervention Program: Services, Training, Opportunity, Prevention), which identifies root causes and connects youth to targeted services. The hope is that RIPSTOP becomes a model for the state.

“I believe it represents the future of how we must address missing child cases: with empathy, data-driven solutions, and collaboration across systems,” Neff says. “We must reject the mindset of ‘They’re just a runaway—they’ll come back.’ Every missing child is at risk until proven otherwise, and every case deserves our full attention.”

In her immediate retirement, Neff is recharging and enjoying time with her grandchildren. She also plans to thoughtfully consider how she may stay involved in the field in the future. She encourages fellow Clearinghouse managers and AMBER Alert Coordinators to carry on the mission on behalf of missing children by setting clear goals, regularly assessing priorities, and building strong partnerships at every level. “This work cannot be done in isolation,” she says.