Dedicated Missing Person Teams Reshape Police Response to Missing Children

Some police forces in the United Kingdom are investing scarce resources into dedicated missing person teams, specialist units that take over the coordination of missing children investigations from frontline response officers. The first systematic evaluation of one such team, published in the Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, suggests the approach changes how risk is assessed, how responsibility is shared with care providers, and how many reports police actually receive. But the evaluation also uncovered a potentially troubling side effect: children in care settings and repeat missing cases were gone for longer periods under the new system, and researchers could not determine whether any of them came to harm.

The team was overseen by a detective inspector and consisted of eight detective constables and one detective sergeant, responsible for managing reports of missing children aged 14 to 17. Under the new structure, all reports were passed to the MPT to conduct background checks and assess risk. Children under 14 reported missing between 3 and 8am were automatically classed as medium or high risk and passed to an inspector to manage and allocate search resources. Cases assessed as low risk or as presenting no apparent immediate risk, a category known as NAIRA, remained under the supervision of the MPT for six hours, during which the team supported care homes, social care partners, parents and other guardians as they took reasonable steps to search themselves.

The scale of the problem the team was designed to address is considerable. More than 300,000 incidents of missing children are typically reported to police in England and Wales each year, and responding to missing incidents costs an estimated £394 to £509 million annually. Children in the care of local authorities, living with foster parents, in residential children’s homes, schools or secure units, represent over 60 percent of cases, are three times more likely to go missing than other children, and often go repeatedly missing. Yet most missing children are found within 24 hours, and more than 96 percent return unharmed, many of their own accord. Despite this, national figures from 2018/2019 showed only 15 percent of missing children were classified as low risk, with 75 percent classified as medium risk and 7 percent as high risk, a mismatch between risk classification, resource allocation and the division of responsibility across agencies that has frustrated police and researchers alike.

The evaluation used a mixed-method, two-study design. In the first study, the researchers analysed anonymised police records of missing reports of 14 to 17-year-olds at four predetermined two-month timepoints: January to February 2019, before the team existed; January to February 2020, during its initial pilot; January to February 2021, when the full team was implemented; and June to July 2021, six months after implementation. In total, 1810 missing incidents involving 737 children were reported across the four timepoints, with a mean age of around 15 years. The researchers applied a quasi-experimental time-series design, using chi-square tests of independence with Bonferroni corrections for categorical variables and one-way analyses of variance, or their non-parametric equivalents, for continuous measures such as the length of time children were missing.

The statistical results showed a marked shift in risk assessment practice. Cases were significantly more likely to be classified as NAIRA six months after implementation than when the full team launched, and significantly less likely to be classified as medium risk compared with the pre-implementation baseline. By the final timepoint, 72 percent of cases were classified as NAIRA or low risk, a striking contrast with the 15 percent national figure from 2018/2019. The proportion of cases with no risk categorisation recorded also fell dramatically, from 63.9 percent at baseline to zero percent at the final timepoint, which the authors interpret as a substantial improvement in the quality of information recording. The number of missing child cases fell as well: almost 50 percent fewer cases were reported six months after implementation compared with the baseline period.

Not every outcome was positive. Repeat missing episodes increased after implementation, with 91.5 percent of cases at the final timepoint involving children with a prior missing history, up from 84.9 percent during the pilot period. The authors caution this should not necessarily be read as failure, because a static history of repeat episodes is not sensitive to change, and the team was not designed to tackle the underlying causes of missingness. More concerning, the length of time children were missing increased over time. Children in care placements were missing for significantly longer at the final timepoint, with a median of 6.28 hours compared with 3.75 hours earlier, and repeat cases were also missing for longer. The researchers suggest this may be because the NAIRA approach pushes search responsibility onto care homes, which often operate with lone working policies and minimum staffing ratios that can prevent or delay staff from searching. Harm outcomes were unavailable, so it was not possible to examine whether children initially identified as NAIRA became increasingly at risk of harm while cases stayed open longer.

The second study was a process evaluation built on 20 semi-structured interviews conducted between July and September 2021 with eight members of the MPT, four internal police stakeholders and eight external stakeholders from local authorities, social work, care homes and Barnardo’s independent advocates. Interviews, ranging from 14 to 76 minutes, were transcribed and analysed thematically, with inter-rater reliability assessed using Cohen’s kappa, which indicated substantial agreement at 0.73. The analysis identified two themes describing what worked well, a child-centred approach and reduced demand on frontline resources, and three themes describing what needed improvement, communicating the team’s role and purpose, understanding risk, and shift patterns.

Officers described how the team minimised the stigmatisation and criminalisation of children in care by taking a more consistent approach to risk assessment, so police resources were deployed only where a child was genuinely assessed as being at risk. Rather than sending officers to collect children who had breached care home curfews stricter than those of their friends, MPT members texted or called young people directly to check they were safe, where they were and when they planned to return, an approach officers said was well received precisely because it involved no visible police presence. The team also pushed responsibility back to care providers to take reasonable steps to locate children believed to be at no apparent risk, providing staff with personal work numbers so they could call directly rather than waiting up to an hour through central switchboards. External stakeholders from local authorities and care homes were willing to accept this shared responsibility, and officers reported that as care providers became familiar with the expectations, many resolved low-risk absences themselves without ever contacting police.

Yet the interviews also exposed significant friction.

Subject of Research: Examining the Impact of Dedicated Missing Person Teams on the Multiagency Response to Missing Children

Article Title: Examining the Impact of Dedicated Missing Person Teams on the Multiagency Response to Missing Children

Article References: Waring, S., Fusco-Maguire, A., Bromley, C., Conway, B., Giles, S., O’Brien, F., & Monaghan, P. (2023). Examining the Impact of Dedicated Missing Person Teams on the Multiagency Response to Missing Children. Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, 7(1), Article 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41887-023-00090-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s41887-023-00090-5

Keywords: Examining, Impact, Dedicated, Missing, Person, Teams, Multiagency, Response, Children, scientific research