Missing adults ‘at greater risk than children’

People in their 30s more likely to come to harm, study finds, prompting call for new approach to cases

POLICE searching for missing people should prioritise adults over children because they are more likely to come to harm, a Cambridge University study has suggested.

Researchers who examined more than 90,000 missing person reports over an 11-year period found that those over the age of 18 were four times more likely to come to harm than youngsters.

In England and Wales a person is reported missing every two minutes and while the vast majority turn up safe and well, investigating each case puts a huge strain on police resources.

Every missing person case is assessed by a police officer as high, medium or low risk, with the person’s age playing a big part in deciding which category to assign. But of the 92,681 reports examined for the study, 89 per cent of high risk cases ended with the person being found safe and well, while almost 60 per cent of cases where the person was harmed were initially classified as low or medium risk.

The data also found the chances of a missing young person coming to harm was four times lower than when an adult in their 30s disappeared.

The Cambridge study suggests that a more evidence- based approach to assessing risk could help save time and money and could also even reduce the number of people who do come to harm when they go missing.

Superintendent Ryan Doyle from Devon and Cornwall Police, who carried out the research as part of a Masters degree in criminology, said he hoped the findings would help forces design a better system for dealing with missing person reports.

He said: “In Devon and Cornwall, missing people is one of the big areas of business we deal with, it is something that affects all our staff on a daily basis.

“The way missing people are assessed is from an investigative mindset, where you ask the questions and then there is essentially a gut feeling from officers based on the information they have got from asking questions and what I wanted to understand was, was that the right way of doing it?

“The amount of resources we put into a high- risk missing person is clearly going to be different to the amount of resources we put into a lowrisk missing person, so it is important we get it right.”

He said while it was vital for officers to use their “instinct” when handling a case, an evidence-based approach was likely to have a better success rate than relying on subjective judgments.

Supt Doyle said while it was understandable that an officer’s instinct was to respond more urgently when a young person went missing, there were numerous other factors to be assessed before the risk factor was calculated.

He said: “The percentage of juvenile males who come to harm is around one per cent, while it is two per cent for females. We are talking about really low numbers of those who come to harm.”

Another important factor that can help calculate the chances of someone coming to harm is whether they have gone missing before.