French Police End Missing Persons Searches, Suggest Using Facebook 95
itwbennett writes "According to an announcement on a French government website, police have stopped current searches for missing adults and will not accept new search requests. 'Such 'searches in the interests of the family' were conducted under an administrative procedure almost a century old, introduced to help families separated during the upheavals of World War I to find missing relatives,' according to the French Ministry of the Interior. In a letter to police chiefs announcing the changes, the Ministry advised them to instead 'direct people towards social networks on the Internet, which offer interesting possibilities.'"
Re:Sensationalist summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if you leave out the important details and get people worked up over nothing. You know, standard operating procedure here.
Re:HELP!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem seems to be in the phrase 'missing person', which I guess is a translation thing. When people hear 'missing person', they think of someone who has suddenly disappeared - didn't come home from work, etc. Those cases they will still investigate, of course. What they are no longer doing is helping to find a person you have lost contact with (and I can't imagine their are many police forces in the world that would help with that under normal circumstances).
Re:HELP!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, taxpaying adults are shit out of luck
Unlike children, adults have a right to disappear and start a new life somewhere else. Unless there is a reasonable suspicion that a law has been broken, the police should not be spending tax dollars to find people that don't want to be found.
Re:HELP!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
His children example was used for shockvalue, but the point is still the same - for the most part, if someone dissappears without a trace, foul play is involved. They MIGHT have just decided to skip town, but most people don't. Lets say its not your 9 year old daughter. Lets say your 23 year old daughter never comes home from work. I'd like to hear something besides "Check Facebook" from the local authorities.
Re:HELP!!! (Score:2, Insightful)
They can also be kidnapped, in an accident, or killed. They can also disappear to avoid debts and other obligations, rather than just wanting a new life. Stopping searching entirely sounds like a really bad idea. For those who did just want a new life, the cops don't have to tell anyone they found them.
Re:So once again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really, there's a presumption that if somebody's been missing for more than a given amount of time that they're in danger, unless there's evidence to the contrary.
Then it's a bad presumption. Most people go missing because they want to. You've got to look for children, senile people and people with mental health issues, because they may not have the capacity for making a rational choice to leave, and the chances of them coming to harm are higher. But adults who get out of contact with their families. In most cases it's because they don't like them, or have some issue they'd rather get away from.
Re:So once again... (Score:4, Insightful)
And if there's foul play, there's likely to be something indicating that.
Yeah, like the person is missing!
In fact, the standard followed by most jurisdictions is: the absence of any indication of intent to disappear is in fact evidence of either an accident or foul play.
Police make at least an effort to find people that simply disappear (after a suitable waiting period), and at least interview friends and workmates etc for changes in behavior, look at credit card usage, and request cell records, before throwing in the towel. (The effort is actually much larger if its a missing woman than if it is a man.) Its not an unreasonable level of effort, nor does it take a great deal of resources. (Some of this stuff is automated these days).
Most people who CHOOSE go missing end up defrauding someone out of some amount of money. Unpaid rent, unpaid credit card bills, saddling a spouse with a huge debt, etc. Its not a victimless choice.