The department reported that since the beginning of this year, 501 teenagers, who appear to be mostly black and Hispanic, had gone missing in Washington. Twenty-two of those cases and five others from 2014 and 2016 remained open on Tuesday.

Cmdr. Chanel Dickerson, who leads the department’s Youth and Family Services Division, spoke in a Facebook Live presentation on Friday about the reports of missing children. The campaign “increased public awareness,” she said. “That’s all.”

Ms. Mikhaylova said, “They leave voluntarily, they come back voluntarily or they are located.”

“Some of the circumstances that would lead an individual to leave home, that is a very complex issue,” she said. “They need to be talked about in the community with as much gravity as anything,”

She added that human trafficking was a concern nationwide, but that “we don’t have an indication that that is what is going on.”

There are no reports that any of the missing teenagers were abducted, Ms. Mikhaylova said.

Also on Friday, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced a series of measures to improve the city’s response to reports of missing children and address issues that lead young people to run away from home.

The figures that the police department reported on missing juveniles in the first quarter of 2017 are on track to equal or be lower than the totals in previous years. At the end of 2016, for example, there were 2,242 missing juveniles (aged 17 and younger) reported.