Missing Persons
Police Reluctant to Investigate
Daniel Muniz

Law enforcement is often caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to finding missing people. Every year there are more than half a million missing person’s reports filed throughout the country. So does that mean that each year there is over half a million dead bodies lying around in this nation due to foul play?

Obviously that is an absurd question to ask because most people who do go missing voluntarily disappear on their own accord. Incidentally, many of these individuals show up within a few days or within a few weeks although there are others who can take months or even years to resurface.

And then there are the ones who never want to be found and they have taken steps to ensure that. In fact, debt collectors have found creative if not illegal ways to locate such individuals. And just about the only people that bill collectors cannot find are the ones who have resorted to identity theft and have completely assumed their new identity or the individuals who now live in the fringes of society without out a paper trail.

As a result, the cops are reluctant to expend time, effort, and resources to look for a person who is more than likely going to eventually show up on their own or who try to find someone who doesn’t really want to be found. And nearly every law enforcement agency in this country has been burned quite a number of time in highly publicized cases by searching for people who voluntarily disappeared.

But the harsh reality is that it would be impractical for law enforcement to thoroughly investigate every missing person’s report because there are so many of these bogus disappearances.

And to the surprise of a lot of people, it is not a crime for someone to voluntarily vanish. Anybody is entitled to go anywhere they want to at any time they want to and not tell anyone about it. In fact, so many law enforcement agencies are rather dispassionate about it because they have seen it happen so many times especially with spouses. Police Officer Ron Campbell of Atlanta Georgia explains:

Although such a scenario may seem bizarre or blatantly irrational, it may very well be the norm for other people even though we now live in a high tech society of cell phones, GPS, and the Internet.

The only legal issue may be that of abandoning a child but that situation is actually a rather recent development. In a previous generation, a father could walk out on his children and never see them again but also not experience any legal ramifications in doing so. Today’s environment is so much different in which that parent is now on the hook for child support which could include wage garnishment and imprisonment if it is not paid. And such deadbeat parents have been found in a number of peculiar ways when their identities were cross-checked with a national database.

Consequently, the real problem is for police to accurately identify who actually did vanish due to a crime or to an unforeseen event. The elderly and young children get top priority although older kids have less urgency because there are a huge number of runaways in this country so again the police are more reluctant to thoroughly pursue a missing person’s report if it involves a teenager.

Near Seattle Washington, Tom Rider experienced such frustrations with the police when his wife Tanya didn’t come home from work. Spokesman Deputy Rodney C. Chinnick of the King County Sheriff's Department explained:

The sheriff’s department didn’t have much to go on with any evidence since they had video footage showing Tanya Rider stepping into her car after the end of the work day. As a result, it was natural for the police to assume that she decided to vanish on her own free will.

However, what really happened was that Tanya’s car skidded off the highway and fell into a steep ravine and the terrain helped conceal the wrecked car. Tom Rider had driven up and down that road looking for her but he didn’t spot the wreckage. It wasn’t until the cell phone company pinged Tanya’s cell phone that she was found still alive eight days later. She had serious injuries and kidney problems but she survived and only because Tom kept hounding the sheriff’s department which prompted a detective to follow up with the cell phone company.

What happened to Tanya Rider vividly illustrates the problem of adults who legitimately go missing although in the grand scheme of things it would be unfair to blame law enforcement. The police have limited resources to track down every missing person’s case. But it was fortunate that her husband wouldn’t give up and that made all the difference in the world.

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