Missing Children in San Antonio: What the Records Count, and What They Cannot

No public record counts missing children in Bexar County

Four public records each count something close to it. None of them is a count of children who are missing, and none of them records whether a child was found.

Entries into the missing person file, Bexar County

* Since September 1, 2025, Texas law requires the entry within two hours of a report, so 2025 is not a clean comparison with 2024.

Juvenile entries in Bexar County went from 3,709 in 2020 to 2,478 in 2025. These count reports, not children: a child reported missing three times is three entries, even if the child comes home that night. Nationally in 2025, 498,038 records were entered and 88,093 were still open at year end.

The report does not define juvenile (Texas law says under 18; federal entry rules reach 21), or say whether a county is where the police agency sits or where the child lives.

Where in Texas the entries are filed

All 254 Texas counties are drawn, and every juvenile entry in the six reports sits in one of them. Together they add up to the 200,899 entries the reports print statewide for 2020 to 2025, checked year by year.

This is not a map of where children are in danger, and it is not a rate. A county with more people and more police agencies files more reports, and the report does not say whether an entry is filed where the agency sits or where the child lives, so no population is put under it.

Shades are five equal-sized groups of the counties that filed any entry. A single year is shaded on groups held fixed across every year, so a county that darkens between years really filed more entries.

Two county-years are out of line with the rest: DeWitt County, 2023: 515 juvenile entries, against a median of 12 in its other years; Oldham County, 2020: 77 juvenile entries, against a median of 1 in its other years. They are shown as printed, and this page does not know why. Our flag rule: one year at least ten times the county median for its other years, and at least 50 juvenile entries.

Children missing from state foster care

That first figure is 3.4% of the 31,475 children in DFPS conservatorship that year, by DFPS’s own count.

Bexar County: 88 children were in a Bexar County placement when they first went missing in FY2023, and DFPS counts 3,505 children in its care in Bexar County that year. The two are not divided into a rate here: the first is counted by placement county, and DFPS does not say how the second is counted.

DFPS also ranks counties by count. That ranking is not repeated here, because it measures where children are placed, not how safe care is. FY2023 is the latest report.

San Antonio Police calls: the record cannot tell a child from an adult

The City files missing children and missing adults under the same call types, and the record has no age field, so no figure from it is a count of children.

No response time is shown: the City’s time column is undefined (see police response times), and here it would include adults.

Where in San Antonio the calls are logged

Of the 31,920 missing person calls San Antonio Police logged from 2023 to 2025, 31,760 (99.5%) are drawn, one triangle per ZIP code. 56 more are in 8 ZIP codes with fewer than 25 calls, shown grey and not drawn; 3 have a ZIP code with no outline and 101 have none. All are in the yearly totals above.

A bigger triangle means more calls. This is not a map of missing children, and it is not a rate. The record has no age field, and a call is logged where police were sent, so a ZIP code with a hospital, care home or shelter can carry many calls about people who do not live there.

Triangles use one scale in every view. Area names are general parts of town, not neighborhoods.

Bexar County Sheriff: the one local record with its own call type

The Sheriff files “Missing Child” as its own call type. The County publishes only the last thirty days, so this series is read from the archive the Sheriff response times tool has kept since August 2026.

Where in the Sheriff’s area the calls are filed

Each call is counted against one of the Sheriff’s own patrol areas; no call’s location is kept. The County publishes no outline for these areas, so each is marked at the middle of the patrol calls it handled. Never add this map to the police map above or compare the two: a different agency, a different part of the county and a different call type.

Stranger abductions, in the one record that counts them

The FBI file has an optional circumstances field. Of the 498,038 records entered nationally in 2025, 239,622 (48%) used it:

Shares are of the entries that recorded a circumstance. The FBI publishes this nationally only, never by state or county.

San Antonio police recorded 98 in 2023, 117 in 2024, 83 in 2025 under the offense “Kidnapping/Abduction”, victims of any age: that record has no victim age either.

What Texas law says

• A child is anyone under 18 (Code of Criminal Procedure, Art. 63.001).
• A runaway is a missing child, and so is a child taken against a custody order or without the custodian’s permission.
• One exception, subsection (3)(D): a child taken without permission is not a missing child if the taking was prompted by family violence, or attempted family violence, against the child or the person who took them.
• Since September 1, 2025 (House Bill 908), police must investigate at once; within two hours, enter the child with the state clearinghouse, the FBI file where the child qualifies, the state network and NCMEC; within 48 hours, alert every police agency within 200 miles; and within 30 days, enter the child in NamUs.

Where every figure comes from

• Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas Missing Person Entries by County into NCIC, one report per year: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.
• Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Children and Youth Missing from DFPS Conservatorship, FY2023, and the children in DFPS legal responsibility by county dataset.
• Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025 NCIC Missing Person and Unidentified Person Statistics.
• City of San Antonio, SAPD calls for service and SAPD offenses.
• Bexar County, Sheriff’s Office incident feed.
• Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, Chapter 63, and House Bill 908 as enrolled.

Figures read 2026-09-10. Every PDF figure was read by two independent programs that had to agree, and checked against its report’s own totals.