About 32,711 people have gone missing in the City of Milwaukee in the last 10 years, according to the Milwaukee Police Department. At any given time, about 500 people are actively missing in Milwaukee. Many are people of color, yet very few make the news. In 2024 through Oct. 15, 2,466 people were reported missing in the city. Each year in the past decade, between 2,500 and 3,300 people have been reported missing each year. Many are short-term missing cases where people are quickly found, highlighting a crisis of online grooming, group home runaways and other issues. Stereotypical stranger abductions are exceptionally rare, and those are the ones that tend to be highlighted in the news.
A team of 12 student journalists spent three months investigating 18 open missing people cases, most of them people of color in Milwaukee but several from smaller Wisconsin cities. The students spoke with family members and detectives and filed open records requests. In the case of Jennings, Milwaukee police declined to answer specific questions on the case, but they did release the full police file to Media Milwaukee. The cases also highlighted a short-staffed police department with a decimated detective bureau and a single detective in charge of all missing person cases at any one time. The files ran the gamut from exhaustive investigations to others where it appeared little work was done, especially as time went on.
The students also tackled the thorny issues lying beneath many of the cases, ranging from mental health of Black men to the city’s crack cocaine epidemic, police empathy, and family dysfunction. They explored the phenomenon that academics have dubbed “missing white woman syndrome” in which people of color are systemically seen as having less news value. In the Sounds of the Missing podcast episodes, nobody had been arrested, and nobody has been accused publicly.
