The Austin Police Department is training 1,500 officers to search for missing children and teens while on patrol. That means scanning every vehicle they stop or looking for clues of trouble at every house call.
Police officers are trained extensively to search for narcotics on every traffic stop. They check the drivers' and passengers' stories about where they are headed. Do they add up? Are they impaired?
But what about looking into the relationship between the people inside the car. Why are they together? That is something Austin officers haven't done before.
"Take a typical scenario is you have an adult male traveling with a female let's say 17 years old, you stop the vehicle headed to a family reunion, but maybe their stories don't match," said Detective J.J.Schmidt.
Detective J.J. Schmidt and others in the missing persons unit investigated nearly three-thousand cases of children under 18 reported missing in 2013.
80-percent of runaways will be sexually or physically abused within 48 hours of being out alone.
Some end up being victims of human trafficking.
