AG’s Office teams up with sheriffs to pass out child ID kits

ALEXANDRIA, La. (KALB) - The Louisiana Attorney General’s Office and the Sheriff’s Association have teamed up to help parents get ID kits for their kindergarten through 5th-grade students.

It’s an alarming statistic - every 40 seconds in America, a child goes missing.

Last year, the AG’s Office started working with the National Child Identification Program, and with the help of sponsors, they were able to get 350,000 kits. That will cover every child in Louisiana from kindergarten through 5th grade.

Sheriff’s departments around the state are distributing the kits in the schools. Each kit includes an inkless fingerprint kit, a DNA sample collection, physical identification information and a place for a recent photo. After the kit is complete, the parent will keep the kit in a safe spot in case of emergency.

“Look, we’ve got to have certain questions answered, and we have to have specific information about the child that is missing,” said Grant Parish Sheriff Steven McCain. “If this is already prepared and completed for us, it saves all that so we can get the information out. We’re a member of a task force that we joined a few years ago with the FBI. We have got detectives across Central Louisiana who are trained specifically on what to do if a child is missing or has been abducted. That team would be activated, and this is something that is going to be given to them immediately.”

Attorney General Jeff Landry, who stopped by our “Good Day Cenla” program to promote the kits, said everything law enforcement would need in case a child goes missing will be in that kit. He told us he hopes the kits will take away some of the stress if a situation like that ever happens by making it easier to get law enforcement what they need to find the child.

“You are going to be glad that you have it,” said Landry. “They keep it, they put it somewhere safe and hope that you never ever need it. But, if tragedy would fall upon and their child would go missing, that’s the first thing we want them to hand law enforcement.”

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