An investigation type that can take hundreds of hours of police work is missing persons. Many of these start off as a well-being check but can morph into a missing-person investigation, which we consider to be high risk.
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In this column, my goal is to provide some insights into the challenges we face with missing persons investigations.
First, let me dispel the false belief that some people have that a person needs to be missing for 24 hours or some other time period before police will act. This seems to again be something from U.S. television and is actually detrimental to an investigation the longer someone waits to report it.
Missing persons are categorized as high risk by police because the missing person could be in serious trouble medically or otherwise. Often these start off as a request for a well-being check by someone such as a friend, employer or family member because they haven’t heard from the person.
Maybe they always come to work on time but for some reason they didn’t show up.
Some reports we get will be weeks or months after the person was last seen or heard from and these are often extremely challenging because of the time delay. The trail we need to establish in order to locate them is already very cold.
The first thing we do is an intake, gathering as much information as we can from the person who reports this, and we have a specifically designed form for this. This will hopefully include a photo of the person, as photos are very important so we know what the person looks like and, in case we send out a media release, it allows the public to know what the person looks like. The higher quality and more recent the photo, the better.
After that, the typical actions are to check places the person frequents and speak to friends, family, co-workers, teammates, etc. We also utilize other tools to locate them in addition to engaging our missing persons unit, who will monitor the investigation to ensure everything that can be done is being done.
We will get reports from people who have taken a lot of time and looked themselves, covering off many obvious ways to find the person, but some report this to us where they have done nothing to locate the person. Either way, these are priority investigations for us and we front-load them with much effort and time to locate the individual. Time is key.
Another challenge is if the person is living a high-risk lifestyle often involving addictions and possibly homelessness. The more structured a person’s life is, the easier it is to find them.
People with outstanding arrest warrants often avoid police, which further complicates locating them. We will also get people who have willingly distanced themselves from friends and family, not wanting them to know where they are.
The end results in these investigations range from never finding the person to locating them in minutes.
Staff Sgt. Jerry Nutbown is the NCO in charge of the Lloydminster RCMP detachment’s General Investigation Section. Stay tuned for future columns from the Lloydminster RCMP.
This column was originally published in the March. 12, 2026, edition of the Meridian Source.
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