Mireya Zapata, 'Voluntary and Habitual Runaway,' Runs Away

Mireya, again with the running away?

​Weekend newspaper readers can be forgiven for for a shudder of déjà vu when they saw local papers putting out the hue and cry on behalf of police to keep an eye peeled for teen runaway Mireya Zapata.

Neither the police -- nor the papers -- bothered to mention that writing a story about Mireya Zapata running away is sort of like rushing to the presses with an article about people speaking Spanish in the Mission or Old Faithful gushing with remarkable consistency. That's because the 13-year-old Zapata is a "voluntary and habitual runaway" who has taken off multiple times in the past, ignited police investigations and media stories, and always returned home of her own volition.

When Zapata last took off, in May, police initially said she "didn't fit the profile of a runaway." That's odd, because the cops were involved in a frantic search for her after she ran away in 2008 -- a story that inspired several writeups in the San Francisco Chronicle.

It turns out that the police don't do a rudimentary Google search for the young people they list as potential kidnapping victims or runaways before putting out a missing child report. As we wrote in May:

[Police officers taking a report], SFPD spokesman Officer Boaz Marilies said, were told by Zapata's family that the girl was not a habitual runaway and this was unusual behavior. So that was what went out on the wire. It wasn't until police inspectors "got a hold of members of the family outside of the immediate circle" that the SFPD realized that Zapata apparently is a habitual runaway and this is usual behavior.

Police do not have Internet access in their squad cars, Marilies said. No one with Internet access punched in Zapata's name prior to the missing child report hitting the Web.

In retrospect, it's hard to fault the San Francisco Police too much for this. Publicizing a missing child report is something that should be done with haste -- and police should not expect to be shined by the missing child's family, as they seem to have been here.

But, in this case, police -- and the media -- should know by now about Mireya Zapata and her M.O. If you spot her, by all means, call the SFPD hotline. But it remains to be seen whether the cops' semiannual Zapata runaway bulletin, their investigation, and the resultant media coverage is the best use of resources for either law enforcement or reporters.

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