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WASHINGTON — The FBI, for the first time, has complied with a 1990 act of Congress by issuing a public accounting of 662,196 lost, runaway and kidnapped children reported by police to state and federal authorities last year.

Fifty-eight percent of the missing children reported to federal authorities in 2005 were girls, according to the FBI report, and 33 percent were black — a disproportionately high percentage that surprised advocates for missing children.

"These are very interesting and important statistics," said sociologist David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. "This shows a pretty dramatic overrepresentation of black kids."

The FBI in the last two weeks released the records at the request of Scripps Howard News Service. The records show that missing-children cases — at least those actually reported to the FBI — have been declining during the past 10 years, down from a peak of 791,687 cases in 1995.

But the number of cases bumped up 7 percent in 2005 after several police departments began for the first time to immediately report missing children. These departments admitted violating federal law by delaying their reports to the FBI — often in hopes the children will return home on their own — or by entirely ignoring cases of suspected runaways.

Missing-children advocates warn that police must intervene quickly — usually within hours — to prevent homicides in stranger-abduction cases.

The newly released data show that a third of missing-children records for 2005 were of black children, nearly three times blacks' share of the general population. Previous estimates based on Finkelhor's studies and records at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children suggested that black children account for about a fifth of missing U.S. children.

"That certainly does not parallel previous estimates," Finkelhor said.

Missing-children experts have long known that runaway children are disproportionately female. Teenage girls mature much faster than boys and are more likely to want to leave home before reaching their legal majority, 18 in most states.

The FBI data show that two-thirds of all missing-children reports were for 15-, 16- or 17-year-olds. Only 2,223 infants were reported last year.