Deborah Knight, center, is the grandmother of Michelle Knight, who was taken off a missing-persons database by Cleveland police in 2003. Reuters

Officials in Cleveland are calling for a review of the city's missing-persons investigations after the police department disclosed that it had long ago removed from a national database one of the three women who reappeared last week.

Police said on Friday they removed Michelle Knight from the missing-persons database in 2003, 15 months after she disappeared, because they couldn't contact a relative to confirm she was still missing.

Cleveland City Councilor Michael Polensek, vice chairman of the council's public-safety committee, said the case raised questions about how city police handle missing-persons investigations. He and the committee's chairman are now requesting an audit of the department's missing-persons probes.

From the Archives


The audit would seek details on the more than 100 missing-persons cases outstanding in Cleveland and answer "how a case stays on the radar screen and who's making that determination," he said.

Ms. Knight's case highlights how some missing-persons cases can fall through the investigative cracks at police departments across the U.S., as detectives struggle to prioritize a large case load with limited resources.

Kenneth Lanning, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who specialized in crimes against children, said that shortly after a person disappears, there are usually more leads than police working the case. But later, leads dry up and departments usually scale back resources and declare a case inactive. "The police have to allocate their resources," he said.

Kenna Quinet, an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said departments should always err on the side of caution and "leave someone in the system when they don't know their status."

Cleveland city spokeswoman Maureen Harper said that under state policy, detectives are asked to remove missing persons from the databases if they can't confirm a person is still missing during annual checks.

Ms. Knight was 21 years old when she went missing, which also complicated the inquiry into her disappearance. "Adults can be more challenging to investigate given the fact that as an adult…you're allowed to go missing if you so choose," said Ms. Harper, who spoke on behalf of the Cleveland police.

Ms. Harper said the department periodically reached out to relatives to check on Ms. Knight's status. In January 2012, they found a relative, and Ms. Knight was placed back on the national list. But in November, when police tried again and didn't reach anyone, Ms. Knight was again removed.

A spokeswoman for the FBI, which maintains the national missing-persons database, said in an email: "It is up to the local law enforcement agency to decide how to manage their case. The FBI would not interfere with their decisions to add/remove entries" in the national database.

Police investigating missing-persons cases have access to an array of resources and methods—such as Amber Alerts, DNA-evidence experts and door-to-door searches—but going after each case full force is essentially impossible, experts say. Hundreds of thousands of people are reported missing each year, the vast majority of whom turn out to have run away, FBI data show.

"The numbers are huge," said Mr. Lanning, the former FBI agent. "You have to make judgments, and anytime you make judgments, you're going to get second-guessed."

In the case of Ms. Knight, police appear to have had few leads to follow from the beginning. With the exception of the periodic calls to a relative to check on her status, there is little evidence police made much progress on where she went, according to her partially redacted missing-persons report released last week.

The report on Ms. Knight spans five pages, compared with 47 pages for Georgina "Gina" DeJesus and 66 pages for Amanda Berry, the other women who emerged last week at the home of Ariel Castro, a 52-year-old former school-bus driver who has been charged with rape and kidnapping. Mr. Castro, who is in custody, hasn't entered a plea in the case.

The approach chosen by police early on is crucial. About three-quarters of child-abduction murders happen in the first three hours, according to a 2006 U.S. Justice Department report. But in the early hours after Ms. DeJesus and Ms. Berry disappeared, questions over whether they were abducted or simply ran away caused Cleveland police to hesitate.

Police never issued an Amber Alert on either case because they had no specific evidence of an abduction. Under state policy, police are encouraged to reserve such an alert for confirmed kidnappings to avoid softening the public's response, said Ohio State Highway Patrol Capt. Rob Jackson, chairman of the panel that coordinates the state's Amber Alert program, which is designed to quickly disseminate information about abducted children.

In 2005, Ohio created a new type of alert for missing children who weren't necessarily abducted, though these alerts don't break into television programming. These alerts are designed for when "a child wanders off or got lost or a runaway that's gotten endangered or a possible abduction," Capt. Jackson said.

Write to Jack Nicas at and Ana Campoy at