Runaways tax police resources
Troopers responded to 5 incidents in 5 days, returning 18 kids to North Whitehall facility
When a child runs away from KidsPeace in North Whitehall Township, it’s an all-hands-ondeck situation for state police at the Bethlehem barracks. Sometimes they ask for help from neighboring barracks, too.
In the last five days, police have responded to the nonprofit treatment facility for children with behavioral and mental health needs five separate times, for groups of runaways numbering from two to eight. In total, they’ve rounded up and returned 18 children to KidsPeace facilities over that period, three of them twice.
And Trooper Nathan Branosky said, “It’s not an unusual number.”
Each time a runaway call comes in, the call gets bumped to the top of the priority list and every officer gets involved, Branosky said. The heightened response happens even if the search spans multiple shifts —
like it did in an incident last month — or multiple days, like when an autistic teen was missing for a weekend in September.
It’s a tax on police resources, and there is no choice but to respond this way, he said.
“Their well-being is at stake at this point,” he said. “Their safety is at stake.”
The most recent runaways occurred Wednesday morning. In a news release, police said they responded to the Orchard Hills campus just after midnight for an initial report of 13 runaways, which they determined was actually eight. The children fled through an open field but were quickly detained and sent back to their rooms.
Two hours later, three of those eight ran away again, police said. Police found them on the roof of the Pioneer House, a residential treatment center in a remote area of campus, trying to wake female residents, police said.
This comes after three calls for runaways over the weekend.
Late Sunday night, just before midnight, police were called to KidsPeace for four boys who ran away from the Marconi House. One of them, staff told police, assaulted a staff member and then walked away. Police also found those four on the roof of the Pioneer House and filed an assault charge against one of them.
Saturday morning, four girls ran away from the Paul Revere House around 3:30 a.m. This time, police say they were unable to find them, citing the late report, which came to them around 5 a.m. The girls returned to the facility on their own about an hour later.
And Friday morning, state police responded around 9:30 a.m. for two missing girls who left the facility without permission. Police found them after a brief search and they returned safely.
Police said that in these and other cases, staff members let juveniles walk out of the facility without stopping them. Police also said staff told them they had called for additional resources but were denied the help by their supervisors.
In a statement, KidsPeace Communications Director Robert Martin said state regulations do not allow staff to physically stop the children unless “they are in imminent danger or pose an imminent danger to others, or if they have a specific safety plan in place that indicates they are in danger of hurting themselves or others if in the community — and in those cases physical restraint can be used only as a measure of last resort.”
He said direct care staff are trained in methods of handling such situations, many of which arise from a youth experiencing a crisis. In those cases, he said, staff use de-escalation strategies to “guide [the children] away from the decision to attempt to leave without permission.”
He said KidsPeace is not aware of any instance when a supervisor advised staff not to request additional help within KidsPeace or from authorities. He added the nonprofit works with state licensing authorities and continuously reviews its protocols and procedures to make sure it is responding to incidents appropriately.
The Orchard Hills campus includes 12 residential treatment centers with the capacity for about 300 children, as well as a psychiatric hospital that can serve 120, according to the state Department of Human Services.
A spokesperson for the Department of Human Services did not immediately provide a comment.
Police also warn travelers in North Whitehall to be aware of potential missing juveniles crossing roads, who can be combative and are known to climb rooftops.