RESEARCH BLOG.

Missing persons research has relevance in victimological scholarship, and that with such research, we could begin to advance...

The following blog features an article summary of a working paper I have with Lorna Ferguson examining police missing persons data accuracy across categories used for risk assessment and determining police response. You will also learn a little about my involvement in this research as a police officer — a unique opportunity for a RCMP officer who is used to investigating and not diving deep into research and evidence-based techniques. The challenges and benefits to embarking

Does TikTok have untapped potential for locating missing people and/or in missing person investigations?...

Think of the last time you saw a missing person poster. Not an emergency AMBER Alert sent to your phone, but an actual photo, description, last known location poster. Was it stapled to a telephone pole? In your mailbox? On a Walmart wall? Maybe, but there is a greater chance it was on social media. Over the past few years, social media has become an increasingly useful resource for police when trying to track down missing persons. In 2019, 73,184 Canadians were reported missi

Child protection is an essential societal responsibility shared by individuals, families, communities, and nations. Part of this responsibility is to ensure that public policies, programs, and laws designed to protect children are based on sound principles and evidence-informed practice. Crime control theater (CCT) is a concept described by DeVault, Miller, and Griffin (2016) as reactionary, sometimes ineffective, and potentially harmful policies that only appear to address

In 2017, a submission to the Government of Canada by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) noted that there needs to be an extensive effort made...

The high number of missing person reports that occur globally each year highlights the need for research in this academically neglected field. In this regard, in Spain, some research is being conducted in collaboration with the Spanish National Centre of Missing Persons (CNDES) dependent of the Spanish Ministry of the Interior. One of the main goals of these initiatives is to generate an empirical body of knowledge which will establish an evidence-informed approach for preven

“Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge” - Lao Tzu Risk is the predominate lens through which academics, police practitioners and policy makers view the phenomenon of missing persons. The logic behind using this lens is both simple and deceptive. One version of it - what I’ll call the ‘academic fallacy’ - runs something like this: a. if we can identify those individual risk factors associated with going missing, b. and we can we