Citrus Heights police use technology to find missing people

Implemented in 2013, Citrus Heights Police Department said they have seen success stories come from Project Life Saver.

CITRUS HEIGHTS, Calif — Citrus Heights Police Department has received 160 missing person reports this year, according to Citrus Heights Police Department spokesperson William Dunning.

To help with this continuous problem, the police department started the Project Life Saver program in 2013 and since then 62 people have signed up and five people have been directly helped by this program.

“The overall goal of Project Life Saver is to utilize state-of-the-art technology to assist locating people who may go missing that have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s dementia,” Dunning said. “We’ve had five successful rescues where we’ve located people who have been enrolled in our program.”

While it’s unclear how many reports involved people in this category, the department still wants people to know about the vital program.

“Time is of the essence, and as soon as we can get a unit or a portal officer or a community service officer in the area of where we last saw that missing person, we are able to pretty much start utilizing technology, and it’s been very successful,” Dunning said.

Currently, Citrus Heights Police Department has 16 active clients using Life Saver half are adults, and the other half are children with cognitive disorder.

Dunning said residents who enrolled get a bracelet that they can put on their wrist or ankle. Each participant’s transmitter is assigned a radio frequency that is unique both to them and to their geographical area of Citrus Heights. If they go missing, police use radio-frequency tracking equipment to find them.

“They fill out a packet that we provide to them so we can get them entered into our system and then from there we would send somebody out to put the bracelet on them then after that we maintain making sure that the bracelet itself the batteries are charged, and they are fully operational,” Dunning said.