Staff Sgt. Jerry Nutbrown brings you behind the scenes with a serious of columns taking you behind police work and how it’s done in our community. If you have a question you think needs to be answered in Behind the Bison, send it to admin@borderpulse.ca and we will be sure to share it with him.
An investigation type that can take hundreds of hours of police work is missing persons. Many of these
start off as a well-bring check but can morph into a missing person investigation which we considered to
be high risk.
In this article my goal is to provide you some insights and challenges we face with missing persons
investigations. First, let me dispel the false belief that some people have that a person needs to be
missing for twenty-four hours or some other time period before police will act. This seems to again be
something off US television and is actually detrimental to an investigation the longer someone waits to
report it.
Missing persons are categorized as high risk by police because the missing person could be in serious
trouble medically or otherwise. Often these start off as a request for a well-being check by someone
such as a friend, employer or family member because they haven’t heard from the person. Maybe they
always come to work on time but for some reason they didn’t show up.
Some reports we get will be weeks or months after the person was last seen or heard from and these
are often extremely challenging because of the time delay. The trail we need to establish in order to
locate them is already very cold.
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The first thing we do is an intake gathering as much information as we can from the person who reports
this and we have a specifically designed form for this. This will hopefully include a photo of the person as
photos are very important so we know what the person looks like and in case we send out a media
release, it allows the public to know what the person looks like. The higher quality and more recent the
photo the better.
After that the typical actions are to check places the person frequents and speak to friends, family, co-
workers, teammates, etc. We also utilize other tools to locate them in addition to engaging our missing
persons unit who will monitor the investigation to ensure everything that can be done is being done.
We will get reports from people who have taken a lot of time and looked themselves covering off many
obvious ways to find the person but some report this to us where they have done nothing to locate the
person. Either way, these are priority investigations for us and we front-load them with much effort and
time to locate the individual. Time is key.
Another challenge is if the person is living a high-risk lifestyle often involving addictions and possibly
homelessness. The more structed a person’s life is, the easier it is to find them. People with outstanding
arrest warrants often avoid police which further complicates locating them. We will also get people who
have willingly distanced themselves from friends and family not wanting them to know where they are.
The end result in these investigations range from never finding the person to locating them in minutes.
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