Urban Search: Managing Missing Person Searches in the Urban Environment. Chapter 1: Introduction

1. What they did

This is the opening of a handbook on searching for missing people in towns and cities. The authors start with two scenarios: an eleven-year-old girl who rode her bicycle to a friend’s house and has not come home, and an 83-year-old man with a history of stroke and dementia who walked away from a care home in a suburban neighbourhood as it was getting dark. They then ask the questions a search manager faces: is the person really lost or avoiding a caregiver, how urgent is it, what resources to use, where and how to search, whether to search at night, and whether a search is needed at all.

They go on to explain why the book is needed, what they mean by “urban search”, and who is usually in charge of such searches.

2. What they found

• Most of the world’s population lives in cities. In the United States, the share of people living in urban areas rose from 40% in 1910 to 75% in 1990 and 79% in 2000, and the authors note that more people in cities means more missing person reports.
• The State of California Department of Justice averages over 100,000 missing person reports a year. Most are in urban areas and are resolved almost as soon as they are reported, but some take longer or stay open.
• Most missing people are found by family or friends or come back on their own (“self-rescue”). Law enforcement is called when that fails.
• Searches usually fall to the local police, who may have basic search procedures but not the knowledge, experience or resources for a systematic area search. Some cities call in wilderness search teams, who find that wilderness tactics do not simply transfer to the city.
• “Urban search” in this book means the ordinary, everyday search for a missing person in the urban environment. It is different from “urban search and rescue” (USAR), a term from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the 1980s for finding and rescuing people trapped in collapsed buildings after disasters (flood search was added after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005). Rescue techniques are left to the agencies that already handle them, such as fire departments.
• In most of the United States and Canada, the local law enforcement agency has jurisdiction over urban searches, though state laws and local protocols vary. The book assumes the search is run by a police or sheriff’s department or another law enforcement agency, which search and rescue calls the “responsible agency”.

3. What they concluded

A system designed for the urban environment is needed. Searching a busy city, with its hazards and crowds, is daunting, and police and search teams can do better when they have search techniques made specially for urban areas, which the rest of the book sets out.