COLUMBUS, Ind. — Local law enforcement officials are building a team of officers and deputies who have undergone specialized training on how to respond to a parent’s worst nightmare — missing and abducted children.
About 20 law enforcement officials from the Columbus Police Department and Bartholomew County Sheriff’s Department took part in a two-day training recently covering skills, techniques and resources that can help them locate missing children quickly and bring them back safely.
The two-day training, which has been conducted annually since 2021, seeks to teach officers the fundamentals of implementing an effective responsive to a report of a missing or abducted child and includes real-life case studies and table-top scenarios in which officers worked theoretically through an abducted child case.
The officers who completed the training have joined the growing ranks of CPD’s Child Abduction Response Team, which is a group of law enforcement officials seeking to ensure a rapid and comprehensive response to a report of a missing or abducted child, officials said. These officers would be alerted in the event of such an incident.
So far, more than 40 local law enforcement officials have undergone the training, including all school resource officers, detectives and supervisors, said Sgt. Courtney Plummer of the Columbus Police Department, who is co-coordinator of CPD’s Child Abduction Response Team, or CART, and who helped lead the training.
“The safety of our kids is a top priority for all of us,” Plummer said. “Preparing and planning for that is essential. …We want to be as proactive as we can on the front end of things in preparing for an incident so we’re operational as quickly as possible after we’re being called out, because the rapid deployment of the team and any resources we have is crucial for a successful outcome.”
For the complete story and more photos, see Thursday’s Republic.
