Winchester Program Helps Locate Missing Citizens

Fifteen years ago the started a program, with the help of the , to aid seniors with Alzheimer’s.

The program focused on seniors that tended to wander away from their home. Family members would give the police department a variety of information on the person and if they ever went missing the department would use that information to help locate the person.

Detective Paul DeLuca of the Winchester Police Department, who heads up the program, which is called Citizens at Risk, likened it to the Amber Alert, except on the local level.

“Sometimes medications could cause people to wander away from home,” DeLuca said. “Naturally their family would get concerned and would need help finding them. With the program we have all that information in the system and we can get it to our officers instantly.”

Over the last few years, the department has expanded the program to include children who suffer from autism and who could also wander away from their home.

“It’s really a great tool to help us locate a missing person,” DeLuca said.

Recently, the Massachusetts 911 Department approved a wireless tracking device known as EmSeeQ from EmFinders. This device allows law enforcement and emergency responders to locate a wandering individual who is wearing the device.  

The device, which is the same size as a wrist-watch, can be worn on the wrist or ankle. It uses cellular technology to determine location coordinates and cannot be activated by the wearer.  

It’s only activated when a caregiver contacts the EmFinder call center. The call center then coordinates with local law enforcement agencies to quickly locate and recover the missing individual.  

DeLuca said that this new technology would be an added benefit to Winchester’s Citizens at Risk program.

“We’ve been very successful in locating people that have walked away from their homes,” DeLuca said. “It’s something that doesn’t happen all that frequently, but the few times it has, we were able to locate the person with the information that we had on file.”