“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