STATISTICS

  • The cost of missing person investigations has been the subject of debate. This article reports a study that sought to establish this cost through a survey of 407 officers and staff in two UK forces and a realistic case assessment undertaken by 33 officers in two UK forces. Both produce cost estimates (£1,325.44 as a realistic minimum and £2,415.80 as a realistic estimate of cost of medium-risk medium-term cases) that are higher than often assumed or previously reported. Read more here


  • In E&W, 61% (198,943) of all missing incidents related to children and 38.7% (126,228) to adults. For the remaining 0.3% of incidents, data did not indicate whether the incidents related to a child or an adult. Read more here


  • In E&W, when missing incidents were broken down by ethnicity (see Table C3), 76% were recorded by police forces as White, 14% as Black, 5% as Asian and the remainder comprised smaller other ethnic minority groups. These percentages were calculated after excluding approximately 31% of all incidents that were reported as ‘Other/unknown’; these related to incidents for which police forces were unable to provide ethnicity data. Read more here


  • In E&W, when reported missing incidents were grouped by gender and age (see Table C4), 66% (75,896) of all female missing incidents related to girls aged 12–17 years, compared with 56% (83,378) of all male missing incidents relating to boys aged 12-17. Read more here


  • Black and Middle Eastern males were more likely to go missing than females in the same ethnic group (Table C5 of statistical file). The ratio of male to female incidents was about 55:44 respectively for the White and Asian group, and 52:47 for the Chinese/Japanese/SE Asian group. However, for the Black ethnic group this ratio was 62:37, and for the Middle Eastern ethnic group it was 71:29. Read more here


  • In E&W, 9% (17,084) of all missing incidents involving children had a Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) flag associated with them. Of these, 78% (13,379) involved girls, 21% (3,523) involved boys, 1% (177) were of unknown gender and 5 involved transgender children. Read more here


  • In E&W, missing adult incidents were three times more likely to result in physical harm and almost eight times more likely to result in self-harm than missing children incidents. Sexual offences related to missing incidents were low for both adults and children. Read more here


  • Most missing person incidents were resolved within 2 days of being reported: 84% in E&W and 98% in Northern Ireland. In Scotland, 75% of missing people were found within 1 day and 97% within 7 days. Read more here


  • In E&W, for people missing from a care setting, 88% of incidents were related to children in 2019/20 compared with 92% in 2018/19. For adults, this was 12% in 2019/20 compared with 8% in 2018/19. Read more here


  • 60% (168,629) of all missing incidents in 2019/20 were made up of children aged 12-17 years (excluding the unknown figures). Read more here


  • Adults aged 18-39 years were the second highest age group of those to go missing at 23% (64,696), followed by the 40-59 years group at 9.4% (26,541). Read more here


  • For the Black ethnic group, the proportion of male missing person incidents have increased by 5.4% since 2017/18. Read more here

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