(Adult) Missing Person SOP

[ComeToTheDarkSideWeHaveCookies]

Prompted by this story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070928/ap_on_re_us/woman_found

During the eight days that Tanya Rider lay seriously injured in her crashed SUV, her husband was fighting red tape to get authorities to launch a search for her, he said Friday.

Rider, 33, was found alive but dehydrated at the bottom of a steep ravine on Thursday, more than a week after she failed to return home from work.

…

Tanya Rider left work at a Fred Meyer grocery store in Bellevue on Sept. 19 but never made it home. When her husband couldn’t reach her, he said, he called Bellevue police to report his wife missing.

Bellevue police took the report right away, but when they found video of Tanya Rider getting into her car after work, they told her husband the case was out of their jurisdiction and he should notify King County, he said.

Tom Rider said he tried that, but “the first operator I talked to on the first day I tried to report it flat denied to start a missing persons report because she didn’t meet the criteria,” he said.

…

Thursday morning, detectives asked him to come in to sign for a search of phone records. They also asked him to take a polygraph test.

“By the time he was done explaining the polygraph test to me, the detective burst into the room with a cell phone map that had a circle on it,” Tom Rider said Friday. He said the detective started explaining the blip they had found and within minutes, news arrived that Tanya Rider had been found.

…

“I know there were delays (in finding her) because of red tape,” Tom Rider said.

A King County Sheriff’s spokesman expressed sympathy but said the agency followed standard procedure in the case.

“That’s a terrible, terrible experience … a heart-wrenching experience, and my heart goes out to him,” Deputy Rodney C. Chinnick said Friday.

“It’s not that we didn’t take him seriously,” Chinnick said. “We don’t take every missing person report on adults. … If we did, we’d be doing nothing but going after missing person reports.”

Adults are entitled to privacy if they decide to do something out of the ordinary, and Chinnick said Rider’s initial missing person report did not contain either of the two elements that would trigger an immediate search: evidence of foul play or unusual vulnerability such as age, mental condition or lack of critical medications.

“Not showing up at home is not illegal,” he said.

This is a tough nut to crack. I can definitely build a strong case for either side, and it is inherently difficult to keep emotions out of it. I keep landing at a point where I think they should at least instigate the cell phone trace on the assumption that something is wrong. Yes, some people are going to perhaps panic and file unnecessary reports that will potentially waste resources. Yes, some people are going to flat-out abuse the system to try and find their cheating spouses. But I do have a problem with “protect and serve” being defined in such a way that it puts the those who might misuse the system foremost in the equation and people like the Riders on the back burner.

[Mtgman]

Make it a civil offense to file a wrongful missing persons report. So if my wife decides to sic the cops on me because I’ve been out playing cards all night and she’s pissed, then I can sue her ass in civil court, or use it as a basis for divorce. I don’t think it should be criminal, someone getting worried about a spouse/loved one should not go to jail over it, but if they’re using the police as an arm of a domestic dispute then give the other partner the ability to retaliate through the court system as well. Oh sure, this brings our already overworked legal system additional traffic, and brings the interpersonal world of relationships even more into the legal sphere, but it would prevent situations like the Riders’.

Enjoy,
Steven